This paper looks at how ‘quietist’ Islamic Salafi actors who claim they ‘don’t do politics’ actually do do politics. Scholarship on Salafism, and Islamic politics more generally, typically dismisses such actors – who continue to reject involvement in formal politics (running for office, violence, and political activism) – as ‘pre-political’. It argues that existing scholarship unjustifiably reduces the concept of ‘politicisation’ to involvement in formal institutional politics, which these groups explicitly disavow, and the resignification of Islamic norms. Instead, I show that by failing to engage with important work within political theory (Bourdieu 1984; Schmitt 1999; Mouffe 2000) scholars, therefore, miss the shifting nature of a religious-cum-political project in the MENA increasingly focused on intra-Muslim debates and competition at the level of concepts in wide circulation; a project animated by the role of non-elite, rank-and-file activists in the reinterpretation and circulation of internally heterogeneous religious and political thought (McCarthy 2018; Spiegel 2015). How does ‘politics’ unfold at this popular level? This is the question this paper answers. Because the non-elite, rank-and-file activists animating this conceptual politics and debate typically don’t write down their ideas, capturing the concepts that underpin their political action is, I argue, only possible via extensive ethnographic data, in addition to numerous interviews, and digital media sources, and Salafi and Islamist literature (written and audio-visual). In this way, I first develop an account of prominent North African Salafi and Islamist groups’ ongoing efforts to draw sharp friend/antagonist distinctions based on their quotidian oral and printed political thinking. Second, I then pulled away from their own articulations (viz. ‘we don’t do politics’) to show that such Salafis do in fact do a politics of differentiation via asserting exclusionary and adversarial friend/antagonist - and, more generally, us/them - boundaries of group difference and superiority to other (Islamist/pro-Islamic groups) at the level of concepts in broad circulation. These concepts include crisis, reform and change, and the political. Scholars of Islamic politics typically argue that Salafi actors concern themselves with religious doctrine and worship, whereas Islamist actors focus elsewhere on politics. Instead, this research shows that Salafis in fact often speak in the same conceptual terrain as other Islamists, but differently, often going out of their way to assert differences in their understandings of these same concepts vis-à-vis opposing Islamist groups.