Contemporary Salafism is a global religious movement and its male participants, whether quietist (Madkhalī), Islamist (Ḥarakī), or Jihadist (Jihādī), are often distinguished from their non-Salafi co-religionists by their full beards. What do these beards reveal about Salafi conceptions of masculinity and how do they allow us to understand the inseparability of practices of self-fashioning pertaining to politics, religion and gender? While previous studies of Salafism have addressed masculinity as represented in Salafi calls for gender segregation, the practical outgrowth of successful gender segregation –whether enforced by state institutions or by sub-state communities –is that Salafi masculinity is necessarily formed primarily among other men. Drawing on contemporary Salafi pamphlets and Internet message boards, this presentation examines debates over the Salafi beard and what the multifaceted performance of this practice can reveal about the entanglement of its wearer in broader questions of textual hermeneutics, political allegiance, fashion, and military service. After laying out key conceptual challenges in the study of Salafi masculinity and the sources through which one can study this question, this paper argues that the beard represented a central site for the negotiation of masculinity among religious scholars and state modernizers in the twentieth-century Middle East. The second half of the paper, in turn, examines the project of Salafi masculinity from the theory to practice, arguing that Salafi scholars sought to articulate a vision of religious masculinity that distinguished their flock from their co-religionists and state planners, alike. By contrast, those outside the scholarly elite mediated political and religious frameworks of facial hair as they simultaneously sought style, piety, financial security and brotherhood at the key sites of neighborhood barbershops and the military barracks. By highlighting the broader ideological battles of facial hair and the ways in which bearded Salafis seek to structure public space, this presentation casts light on the ways in which gender shapes how Salafi men participate in pious individual cultivation and community formation alike.