Description
Part of a global ‘fundamentalist’ Sunni religious movement formed of scholars, preachers, and lay individuals propagated worldwide since the 1980s by Saudi-sanctioned Islamic institutions, Salafi groups are perhaps the most tangible example of how Islam and transnational Islamic actors simultaneously function across discrete geographic and social scales. Scholarship on religious transnationalism typically depicts Salafi actors as disseminating a broadly rigid, universal framework largely detached from the specificities of the national and local contexts (Roy, 2017). This paper, however, radically challenges this account. Instead, it argue that, since early 2020, the role of national and local histories and politics in variously shaping the religiosity and politics of four prominent Salafi networks across North Africa has increased I thus highlights the capacity of these local Salafi grassroots actors to pursue their own agendas and act independently from Saudi transnational religious influence and authority. Via extensive ethnographic work, and also qualitative content analysis of interviews, online sermons, social media statements, and printed and audio-visual Salafi literature, this paper thus shows that the interconnectedness of transnational Salafi actors is now being replaced by a multiplicity of increasingly disconnected and decisively autonomous trends with no unifying organisational and hierarchical ‘centre’.
