This paper looks at something unexpected – how ‘quietist’ Salafi actors in Morocco and Algeria, who claim they “don’t do politics”, actually do do politics. Politically ‘quietist’ expressions of Salafism were long thought to be a defining feature of Salafi trends. These Salafi groups are typically known for their focus on studying and teaching Islam, and cleansing it of ‘impurities’, and their lack of interest in formal politics, if not their traditional full-blown rejection of all formal political participation and activism. Much contemporary scholarship on global Salafism typically describes the politics of Salafi actors in terms of involvement in formal institutional politics, and how they contest state authority and legitimacy – practices that ‘quietist’ Salafi groups explicitly disavow. This paper, however, attempts to advance understanding of Salafi political practices and, in doing so, broaden and nuance notions of ‘political’ Salafis within the scholarship on Islamic politics. It does so by critically reworking interventions on boundary-politics (Schmitt, 1996) political friendship (Friedman 1992; Schwarzenbach 2009). Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic data, and analysis of Salafi literature, this paper radically rethinks the nature of Salafi politics in terms of practices of drawing friend/antagonist borders and of intra-group solidarity-as-friendship at the level of key concepts of (a) “crisis” (al-Azma), (b) “change” (al-Taghyīr), and (c) “politics” (al-Siyāsa).