A Divine Path to Politics: Salafism and the State in North Africa

• In Event: Poster Session: Religion and Politics & Political Networks
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Religion and the State

Abstract

The literature on the ‘politicisation’ of Salafism since 2011 focuses on the emergence of formal Salafi political organisations (such as the Egyptian Nour party) or Salafi-Jihadi organisations and violence in cases (such as Egypt and Syria) where widespread popular protests led (initially) to dramatic political openings and/or violent conflict. It thereby largely reduces Salafi politicisation to Salafi involvement in institutional politics or violence. The expanding body of scholarly work on Salafism since the 2011 Arab Uprisings therefore provides us with an opportunity to reassess our understanding of ‘politics’ associated with those many Salafis who did not ‘politicise’ in these sense. Salafism in Morocco and Algeria (particularly since 2011) has also received little scholarly attention, however, despite dramatic evolutions within Salafi circles. By mapping (ideational) political competition between prominent Salafi networks (in Marrakech, Rabat, and Algiers) and Moroccan and Algerian state institutions (and also key Islamist movements), this paper reassesses the ‘politics’ associated with the majority of Salafis who did not ‘politicise’ by engaging in formal politics or violence. This paper is thus centred on a puzzle: How do ‘apolitical’ purist Salafi networks understand ‘politics’? From this, I derive a two-part question: First, are ‘apolitical’ purist Salafis in some sense ‘political’? And, second, what is a Salafi ‘politics’? I argue that Salafis who still reject formal institutional politics are ‘political’ in a distinctive way: they engage in practices of normative boundary-drawing focusing on ‘the political (field)’. This normative boundary-drawing (of ‘the political’ as a field) – in effect, the assertion of normative power – is the most important form of power for these Salafis. This paper understands boundary-drawing as a normative form of discursive-ideological power with real effects - it shapes the ways in which actors determine certain conditions of their existence (e.g. what they think is ‘good’). I thus understand ‘the political’ as something that is always in formation (via boundary-making). Drawing on, inter alia, a large range of written and oral Salafi and state literature, and an eighteen month political ethnography of Salafi networks in Morocco and Algeria, I substantiate these claims by mapping these actors’ normative boundary-drawing practices around ‘the political’. In pursuit of the ‘good society’ (in a Salafi sense), grassroots Salafis construct normative boundaries of ‘the political’ such that many of the activities the Moroccan and Algerian formal religious establishment and Islamist parties various deploy in producing (their own discrete notions of) the ‘good society’ (such as the production of a compliant/submissive society via legal regulations and their enforcement or state-led citizenship formation through local education, or involvement in institutional politics) are designated as ‘illegitimate political work’. These Salafi networks instead variously designate various Salafi educational practices as legitimate political (!) practices. I then show how formal Moroccan and Algerian state institutions (and also prominent Islamist movements, such as the PJD and MSP) also variously articulate normative boundaries around ‘the political’. They simply construct different boundaries around this concept. Salafi boundary-drawing of ‘the political’, as the assertion of an alternative norm, is, I argue, an effort to challenge the state’s monopoly to shape citizens and their normative horizons, confronting the state’s desire to mold and discipline its citizens in support of a different agenda. Accordingly, this study expands the notion of what a grassroots Salafi is, as a ‘political’ actor, by arguing that Salafism’ relationship to politics can (and should) be studied at the level of Salafi practices of normative boundary-drawing rather than (pre-defined) quietist or activist practices. Furthermore, pace much of the (post-)Islamism scholarship, Islamists’ public categorization of objects, behaviour, and cultural products as halal and haram is political not simply because it enforces religious morality, challenges the state’s ability to shape local ideas, and garners popular support. It is political precisely because of the normative, ideological, and discursive power that these boundary-drawing practices reveal, viz. by shaping the ability of actors to shape new conceptions of their existence (as ‘good’). This study of (ideational) political competition between Salafi networks and state institutions thus illuminates new ways of thinking about the informal political practices of Islamists. I believe my approach to a normative Salafi politics of ‘the political’ will offer valuable new insights to interpret the informal politics of Islamist actors. I won a POMEPS GRE Grant for this research, and recently presented this paper at the ‘Future of Salafism’ conference at Oxford.

Author

• Guy Eyre, The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London