Introduction

Salafi politics and ideology have been a central preoccupation of scholars and policymakers since the September 2001 attacks on the US. The ideological tenets of al-Qaida were immersed in Salafi religious understanding and practices and, since then, works on Salafism have increased considerably. Much of the scholarly attention has focused on the growing phenomenon of Jihadi-Salafism, a very specific, and in fact rather novel, form of Salafi practice and politics. The arrival of the Islamic State in the summer of 2014 saw a considerable increase in the number of studies on the relationship between politics, Salafi doctrine and violence. Some of these studies broached the issue of how its political project fits with the established norms of the international state system. Richard Nielsen's study was most notable among them, arguing that the Islamic State's doctrine on the international system rejects the notion of state sovereignty and is therefore incompatible with the Westphalian state system that has been in place for centuries. According to Nielsen, ‘Daesh's existence poses a fundamental challenge to international order’ and he dismisses the notion that if Daesh were to hold territory for a long period of time – thereby creating an embryonic caliphate – it would eventually accept basic international norms and recognise the sovereignty of other states. In short, Jihadi-Salafism is ideologically opposed to the Westphalian system because its reading of religious precepts prevents it from doing so and it is therefore inevitably driven to dismantle it in favour of clearer divisions between believers and non-believers in two distinct political camps.

Given the political relevance of Jihadi-Salafism and its concrete manifestation in the Islamic State's and al-Qaida's survival, it is understandable that much attention has been dedicated to this phenomenon. However, this, together with its military defeat, should not detract from exploring other forms of Salafism, which have received less attention, but are equally impor-tant to analyse because they offer a very different picture of the relationship between Salafism and politics, including international relations, and because they attract many more followers in sheer numerical terms than Jihadi-Salafism. As Wiktorowicz makes clear in his seminal 2006 article, there are two other branches of Salafism when it comes to how Salafis should understand and ‘live’ the relationship between politics – broadly speaking – and religion: the quietists and the ‘politicos’. Although Wiktorowicz's classification has come under scrutiny for its rigidity, it remains a useful starting point.