Zoltan Pall

The past two decades have seen an increasing association between Lebanese Salafism and violence, with less attention being paid to Salafis who focus on peaceful proselytization. In reality, it is these Salafis whose influence has dramatically grown since the eruption of the Syrian conflict that profoundly affected Lebanon as well. Based on extensive fieldwork, Zoltan Pall offers insights into the dynamics of non-violent Lebanese Salafi groups and examines the importance of transnational links in shaping the trajectory of the movement. In particular, he shows how the internal transformation of Salafism in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia led to the fragmentation of the Lebanese Salafi community. By analysing Salafism as a network, we see how the movement creates and mobilizes material and symbolic resources, and how it contributes to reshaping the structures of authority within the country's Sunni Muslim community.

Salafism is one of the most dynamic and rapidly growing Islamic movements and it is impossible to understand contemporary Islam without taking account of it. The movement has reached almost every corner of the Muslim world, and its transnational networks span the globe. Despite the importance of Salafism, scholars have only recently begun to pay serious attention to the movement, and while the body of literature on Salafism is growing, there are still many lacunae. The Lebanese context adopted by the author of this important study provides an excellent opportunity to explore the dynamics of the Salafi movement worldwide.

Engaging with contemporary literature on migration and home-making, in this article I examine Salafi concepts of home and its relationship to the idea of nation-state. I discuss how Salafism, a transnational Islamic proselytizing movement, strives to create the ideal home for believers by reorienting their belonging from the local and territorial to a deterritorialized and abstract space. Thereby Salafism bypasses, and indirectly challenges, the nation-state due to the inherent tension between the aspirations of the two. Presenting case studies from Cambodia and Lebanon I show how the Salafis' strategy of home-making can differ depending on the local sociopolitical context, how the home-making process plays out in reality, and how the Muslim communities' relationship to the nation-state in which they live and their attachment to the territory influences it.

Quintan Wiktorowicz’s typology and other methods of classification developed by other scholars from his approach have been the most popular when studying Salafism. However, such typologies, especially when examining Salafism in non-Middle Eastern and minority contexts, have their shortcomings. The first main problem with current typologies is that they discuss distinct Salafi factions at a specific time and local context, but intend to be universal. However, these factions often tend not to be conceptually different, as in many cases, their participants only behave differently due to different circumstances in different localities. Second, these typologies were devised by scholars who chiefly study the Middle East and distinguish different Salafi groups based on their discourses on issues often relevant only in Middle Eastern contexts. This article tests the applicability of the existing classifications of Salafism by drawing on three ethnographic case studies from Cambodia. In Cambodia, Salafism emerged in a Muslim minority context. With the expansion of its networks, fragmentation occurred within the movement due to disagreements such as how to deal with the Muslim (non-Salafi) other and the non-Muslim majority. The article argues that classifications should be set up based on observing local group dynamics instead of being universal. This is because differences among Salafis, just as in other social movements, mainly arise due to the participants’ interaction with the local realities and issues.

This article explores the characteristics and structure of the Cambodian Muslim social media scene and considers what they tell us about the sociopolitical setting
of the country’s Muslim minority. It focuses on how the relationship between Islamic actors of the Cambodian Muslim minority, that is, groups, movements and institutions, and their offline environment shape their online representations and proselytization activities. It particularly considers the observation that theological debate is almost absent in this Islamic social media scene compared to that of other Southeast Asian Muslim societies and attempts to find answers to the question of why this is the case. The article particularly examines the Facebook pages of various Islamic groups and explains the sociopolitical factors and language politics that inform the ways in which they formulate the contents and style of their posts. It shows how the close connections between the political and the religious fields in an authoritarian setting, where the state strongly discourages social discord, have the effect of largely muting debates on social media.

In chapter 11, Zoltan Pall and Mohamed-Ali Adraoui provide a snapshot of stories from their practical experiences conducting research on Salafis in Lebanon, Kuwait, and France in order to illustrate how to deal with Salafis as subjects of social science inquiry and to provide broader lessons for future researchers. They discuss the challenges and difficulties they faced while conducting fieldwork that came from the Salafis’ distrust of western researchers. They also elaborate how did they overcome these challenges and difficulties by clearly stating their intentions and embedding themselves to the local societies. The authors also provide insights how local sociopolitical actors might engage with the researchers of Salafism, and share their experiences to deal with them.

After the departure of the United Nations and the restoration of the monarchy in 1993, Cambodia’s Muslim minorities became an important hub of transnational Muslim networks and movements, including the Salafī movement, which is increasingly influential. This article will examine how Salafism has inserted itself into Cambodian society and what limits there may be to its continued growth.

This article argues that the pragmatism displayed by Salafi politicians after the 2011 Arab uprisings might not apply to the larger networks of the movement. Such pragmatism contributed to organizational dysfunction in Kuwait’s largest Salafi group, al-Jama‘a al-Salafiyya. The ideological foundations of the group stood at odds with its extensive institutional structures, impeding it from function- ing effectively. To explain this, the article draws on a comparison with the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait, whose ideology and disciplinary practices facilitated the establishment of tight-knit, highly efficient organizations.

terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the roots of the fragmentation of Salafism in Kuwait. Particular importance is given to the post-Gulf war theological debates in Saudi Arabia and how they affected the movement in Kuwait, leading to the emergence of " purist " and " activist " (haraki) factions. This enduring dichotomy has determined the structure of the Salafi scene in the country. The interplay of theological disagreements regarding local and transnational political developments caused the fragmentation of Kuwaiti Salafism. The chapter thus examines how a debate on theological issues between two main Salafi authorities of Kuwait led to internal division and a split among Salafis. The analysis then moves on to how and why the international and local political context of the Arab Awakening affected the highly dynamic and fluid Salafi scene in Kuwait. terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber:

This article is an inquiry into how the transnational networks of Salafism in Europe and the Middle East are structured by looking at two case studies: one about a Lebanese-Palestinian preacher in Sweden and one about a Dutch preacher in the Netherlands and the UK. By presenting these case studies we explain the predominance of informality in these networks, and highlight the different ways in which they link European Salafi preachers to the Middle East, yielding different types of social capital. Our findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK between 2007 and 2012.

This chapter aims to demonstrate how theological debates play a role in the evolution, development, and inner working of transnational Islamic charities based in the Arabian Gulf. Most of these charitable institutions are connected to a social movement. Therefore to understand their dynamics, it is crucial to examine the internal debates and divergence of the Islamic social movement of which the charities constitute an integral part.
I will show how the fragmentation of the transnational Salafi movement affected the Kuwaiti Jamaʿiyyat Ihya’ al-Turath al-Islami (Revival of Islamic Heritage Society – RIHS) and led to a change in its profile and policy. In turn, these transformations have also had impacts on the structure of Salafism in several localities, where RIHS had welfare activity. I demonstrate this with two case studies on Salafism, one in North Lebanon and one in Indonesia.
Salafi charities are part of a broader project aimed at establishing a pious Islamic society. This can usually be understood as poverty alleviation, the distribution of food aid, and providing free or heavily subsidised medical services. These are carried out alongside religious lec- tures, building mosques and religious colleges, and distributing religious literature. In other words, aid and development programmes serve as avenues for the Salafi message to reach society.