The scholarship on ‘Salafi politicisation’ post-2011 focuses on new Salafi political parties or Jihadi groups. It thereby largely reduces Salafi politicisation to involvement in institutional politics or violence. (Non-Jihadi) Salafism in Algeria and Morocco has also received little scholarly attention, despite important recent evolutions. By mapping ideological (informal) political competition between prominent Salafi and Islamist networks, and also state institutions in Morocco and Algeria, I reassess the ‘politics’ of those Salafis who did not ‘politicise’ in these senses– the so-called ‘apolitical’ Salafi trend and large majority of Salafis in the MENA. I ask: How do ‘apolitical’ purist Salafi networks understand ‘politics’? Are ‘apolitical’ purist Salafis in some sense ‘political’? And what is a Salafi ‘politics’? I contend that Salafis who still reject institutional politics are ‘political’ in a distinctive way: they engage in normative boundary-drawing practices focusing on ‘the political’. This normative boundary-drawing (of ‘the political’) – in effect, the assertion of a normative discursive-ideological power with real effects that shape the ways in which actors determine certain conditions of their existence (e.g. what they think is ‘good’ and ‘possible’) – is the most important form of power for these Salafis. I thus understand ‘the political’ as something that is always in formation (via boundary-making). Drawing on a two-year political ethnography of Salafi and Islamist networks in Marrakech and Algiers and their literature, I substantiate these claims by showing how Salafis construct normative limits around ‘the political’ in ways that designate the practices that Islamists and the state variously deploy in producing (their own discrete notions of) the ‘good society’ (such as producing a compliant society via enforcing legal regulations, state-led citizenship formation through education, or involvement in institutional politics) as illegitimate political practices. These Salafis instead designate Salafi educational practices as ‘legitimate political(!) work’. These Islamist movements and state institutions also construct different normative boundaries around ‘the political’. Accordingly, one should study Salafism’s relationship to politics at the level of boundary-drawing rather than (pre-defined) quietist or activist practices. Furthermore, pace much of the (post-) Islamism scholarship, Islamists’ public categorisation of objects, behaviour, and cultural products as halal or haram is political not simply because it enforces religious morality, challenging state’s abilities to shape local ideas, but also because of the normative, ideological, and discursive power that boundary-drawing practices reveal. This approach to ideological political competition thus illuminates new ways of understanding the informal political practices of Islamic actors.