Introduction: Defining Salafism, Analyzing Canons

Tür:

Kitap Bölümü

Yayın yılı:

2016

Yayıncı:

Cambridge University Press

This book examines the interaction between two important forces on the world stage: Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, and Salafism, a loosely organized community of Muslim activists who claim that they alone incarnate the practices and beliefs of the earliest Muslims. In northern Nigeria, a majority-Muslim region, Salafis have become prominent as preachers, media stars, and allies of certain elected politicians. These Salafis challenge the religious dominance of hereditary Muslim rulers and Sufi shaykhs by advancing a largely textualist model of religious authority. This book provides insight into how Nigerian Muslims are negotiating their relationships with one another and with the contemporary Middle East – especially Saudi Arabia, where Salafism receives political and institutional support. At the same time, the trajectory of Salafism in northern Nigeria sheds light on the stages through which the global Salafi movement has passed. Salafis around the world, even in non-Arab lands, have come to invoke a set of Arabic texts and a group of twentieth-century Middle Eastern thinkers as standards of authority in local struggles over who gets to speak for Islam. Examining Salafism in Nigeria illustrates how references to core texts can reflect membership in religious communities – and how such references provide a key tool for understanding the many geographically dispersed, decentralized religious activist networks that are helping to shape the world today. On the…

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