Post-Salafism and its Prospects Beyond Saudi Arabia  SYNOPSIS COMMENTARY

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Post-Salafism and its Prospects Beyond Saudi Arabia SYNOPSIS COMMENTARY

7 Feb 2023

Post-Salafism and its Prospects Beyond Saudi Arabia By Muhammad Haziq Bin Jani SYNOPSIS Salafism is undergoing a transformation in Saudi Arabia, but the prospect of an inclusivist global Salafism is limited by the credibility of this top-down Salafism, as well as by local efforts to encourage contextualised and inclusivist interpretations of Islam. [...] The announcement was to celebrate the Kingdom’s founding in February 1727 instead of 1744, which was previously established as the beginning of the first Saudi State, born out of the covenant between Muhammad Bin Saud and the eponymous founder of Wahhabism, Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. [...] Wahhabism is a term used by scholars to refer to the Saudi brand of Salafism, a branch of Sunni Islam whose adherents claim to emulate the first three generations of Muslims after the death of the Prophet Muhammad as closely and in as many spheres of life as possible. [...] Post-Salafism in Saudi Arabia Besnik Sinani, Research Fellow with the Center for Muslim Theology at Karl Eberhard Tübingen University in Germany, argues that Saudi Salafism has been undergoing a decades-long transformation in response to changes in Saudi state policies and society, mainly in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the emergence of terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. [...] This process, which Sinani terms as post- Salafism, is the result of government pressure on Salafi scholars, which included the arrests of dissenters and extremists; shifts in Saudi public perception regarding the role of religion in the public sphere and internal revisionism of Salafism.

Authors

Janet Fung

Pages
4
Published in
Singapore