When on an autumn day in 1948 a small band of religious scholars from Mauritania departed for the pilgrimage in Mecca, little did the aspiring scholar Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti (d. 1974) know that this was the last time permanently setting foot in Africa. Shinqiti’s migration to the nascent king-dom and subsequent “conversion” to Salafism followed a well-described pattern of opportunist and persecuted religious scholars who in the twentieth century sought political asylum and a career in Saudi Arabia. Appointed as a professor at the Islamic University of Medina in 1961, Shinqiti soon became revered for his contribution to the field of hermeneutics, particularly for writing the major qur’anic commentary entitled ‘Adwa al-bayan fi idah al-Qur’an bil-Qur’an. However, despite the continuous popularity of the work, no study on Shinqiti has yet appeared in the West. Similarly, de-spite a burgeoning interest in Salafism, few scholars have seriously studied that most caricatured de-scription of the modern salafi movement: the movement’s hermeneutical commitment to a literal in-terpretation of scripture. This paper will accordingly study the historical and intellectual formation of salafi hermeneutics through the prism of Shinqiti’s migration from Mauritania to Medina. Contrary to common opinion my paper will argue that context is key to a proper understanding of literalism in contemporary Salafism. Perusing hitherto unstudied primary sources – books, magazines, fatwas, memoirs, cassette recordings and more – this argument will be demonstrated in three parts, beginning with Shinqiti’s first recorded pre-salafi lesson on metaphorical speech (majaz) delivered in Sudan in 1948. Moving onwards to Saudi Arabia, my paper will secondly portray Shinqiti’s “conversion” to Salafism in the mid-1950s by exploring Shinqiti’s first published work on the rejection of metaphori-cal speech from 1956. Representing a sharp break with the prior position taken in Sudan, my paper will thirdly track the “salafization” of Shinqiti’s position on hermeneutics in Saudi Arabia by studying a selection of glosses from ‘Adwa al-bayan published from 1968 onwards, demonstrating how Shinqiti’s literalism differed from the traditional theory of linguistic assignment (‘ilm al-wad’) in classical Islam. Thus, by combining the study of hermeneutics with the historical study of the salafi movement, my hope is that Shinqiti’s personal and intellectual itinerary may offer a more nuanced view of what it meant to be a literalist salafi in the twentieth-century Muslim world.