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.

This paper proposes a new approach to the study of Political Islam, centered on the exploration of Islamist movements’ theological imaginary. Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor (2003), the paper defines theological imaginary as the transformation of theology into the deep normative notions that enable rank-and-file believers’ practice of society. The data are drawn from ethnographic research conducted in 2012-2014 and in 2018 among Nur students in Turkey, including participant-observation, interviews, and archival sources. A politically influential community of roughly six million people, Nur students are followers of Said Nursi, a Sunni scholar who preached in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey from ca. 1890 to 1960. The broader research explores the religious reasoning that unfolds during Nur students’ sohbets (collective readings of Nursi’s Qur’anic exegesis) and the socio-political activism that these collective reflections inspire. This paper focuses specifically on Nur students’ understanding and practice of democracy through an analysis of the following: the theological anthropology that sustains Nursi’s conception of democracy as a moral imperative; the connections existing in Nur students’ theological imaginary between pious management of the self and ethical management of the state; Nur students’ practical engagement with democracy during the 2010 national debate on constitutional reform and during the 1971, 1980, and 2016 military coups. The proposed methodology makes three important contributions to the study of Political Islam. First, it provides a link that is missing in other sociological and political science approaches to Islamic groups, which are unable to bridge the apparent gap between theological teachings and political action. Second, it unravels what to many observers of Islamic movements appears as a paradox, namely the rejection of politics as an autonomous field independent from God’s authority (hakimiyya), and the simultaneous overcome of this rejection by a type of engagement that is ultimately political. The paradox is no longer such if one sheds out analytical models exclusively focusing on opportunity structures and political mobilization and delves on the reflexive processes that originate in the cultivation and embodiment of religious principles. Third, by firmly positioning Islamic political behavior within the wider context of religious reasoning, it demonstrates the profound rationality and normativity that sustains Islamic political projects. This challenges the narratives that present Political Islam merely as either an ideological instrument in the hands of oppressive regimes, or as a vessel to channel political frustrations and socio-economic grievances.

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.

No medieval Muslim author has had a greater impact on modern Islamic thought than Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). His considerable influence in the modern world can be attributed to the strong resonance of his thought with modern Muslim sensibilities: in particular, his scriptural originalism, critique of Sufi practices and classical scholastic theology, and his uncompromising attitude towards non-Muslims. This fundamentalist portrait overlooks, however, the more constructive elements of Ibn Taymiyya’s thought, which have an equally “modern” tinge to them. A remarkable example of this is Ibn Taymiyya’s uniquely functionalist approach to politics and religion, which he based on an elaborate theory of how human societies form and develop. Indeed, in looking to his broader theological project of religious fundamentalism, the centrality of his sociological thought cannot be overstated, although it has to date been severely neglected in the study of Ibn Taymiyya. In my paper, I aim to rectify this glaring lacuna by analyzing a few of Ibn Taymiyya’s treatises and fatwas in which he employs sociological evidence in support of his idiosyncratic theological positions within the Islamic tradition. For example, long before Émile Durkheim (d. 1917), Ibn Taymiyya recognized the role of religion as a source of camaraderie and solidarity, which led him to develop a universal definition of religion that emphasized its empirical, social aspect. On the basis of this definition, he was able to promote a relatively disenchanted view of religion that implicitly criticized the reigning mystical understandings of Islam. Similarly, in the realm of politics he was committed to an almost modern teleological theory of secularization that led him to politicize religion in such a way that would ensure that Islam remains the hegemonic force in medieval Muslim society. A striking feature of each of these discussions is the quasi-naturalist approach to the development of human societies, which presumes the existence of a natural sociological law that, for all intents and purposes, operated outside the direct continuous intervention of God. By analyzing this neglected aspect of Ibn Taymiyya’s thought, I hope to illuminate an important strand of Ibn Taymiyya’s proto-modernism, one which has not found a strong reception amongst the modern Salafiyya, but one which is equally integral to a proper understanding of this controversial medieval figure.