Salafism: Pro or anti-establishment?

http://www.middleeasteye.net/in-depth/reviews/history-behind-idea-salafi-jihadism-1501652852
Salafism as a religious school aims, in general, to emulate the earliest three generations of Muslims, the al-salaf al-salihin ("pious predecessors").
How this idealised state of affairs can be reached is a matter of debate and dissension within the collective world of Salafi thought. Some, like IS, espouse the smashing of nation states and the creation of a Khalifa; others, for example the Wahhabi clerics within the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, prefer to advise the government rather than seek to supplant it. Still others, such as Ahrar al-Sham, a rebel group in Syria, have Salafi ideas and take up violence in certain instances to implement them, but have no fundamentally global ambitions – in this way Ahrar is thoroughly unlike IS, whose raison d'être is transnational in essence.


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ 

March 2015: These quietist Salafis, as they are known, agree with the Islamic State that God’s law is the only law, and they eschew practices like voting and the creation of political parties. But they interpret the Koran’s hatred of discord and chaos as requiring them to fall into line with just about any leader, including some manifestly sinful ones. “The Prophet said: as long as the ruler does not enter into clear kufr [disbelief], give him general obedience,” Pocius told me, and the classic “books of creed” all warn against causing social upheaval. Quietist Salafis are strictly forbidden from dividing Muslims from one another—for example, by mass excommunication. Living without baya’a, Pocius said, does indeed make one ignorant, or benighted. But baya’a need not mean direct allegiance to a caliph, and certainly not to Abu Bakr al‑Baghdadi. It can mean, more broadly, allegiance to a religious social contract and commitment to a society of Muslims, whether ruled by a caliph or not.

Quietist Salafis believe that Muslims should direct their energies toward perfecting their personal life, including prayer, ritual, and hygiene. Much in the same way ultra-Orthodox Jews debate whether it’s kosher to tear off squares of toilet paper on the Sabbath (does that count as “rending cloth”?), they spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring that their trousers are not too long, that their beards are trimmed in some areas and shaggy in others. Through this fastidious observance, they believe, God will favor them with strength and numbers, and perhaps a caliphate will arise. At that moment, Muslims will take vengeance and, yes, achieve glorious victory at Dabiq. But Pocius cites a slew of modern Salafi theologians who argue that a caliphate cannot come into being in a righteous way except through the unmistakable will of God.


http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia/083-indonesia-backgrounder-why-salafism-and-terrorism-mostly-dont-mix.aspx 
2004: The term salafism describes a movement that seeks to return to what its adherents see as the purest form of Islam, that practiced by the Prophet Mohammed and the two generations that followed him. In practice, this means the rejection of unwarranted innovations (bid'ah) brought to the religion in later years.

The strictest salafis in Indonesia:

• are religious, not political activists;
• eschew political or organisational allegiances because they divide the Muslim community and divert attention from study of the faith and propagation of salafi principles;
• reject oath-taking to a leader -- central to the organisational structure of groups like JI;
• believe it is not permissible to revolt against a Muslim government, no matter how oppressive or unjust, and are opposed to JI and the Darul Islam movement because in their view they actively promote rebellion against the Indonesian state; and
• tend to see the concept of jihad in defensive terms -- aiding Muslims under attack, rather than waging war against symbolic targets that may include innocent civilians.

While some involved in terrorism in Indonesia, such as Aly Gufron alias Mukhlas, a Bali bomber, claim to be salafis, the radical fringe that Mukhlas represents (sometimes called "salafi jihadism") is not representative of the movement more broadly.

https://muslimsinafrica.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/sufis-v-salafis-winning-friends-and-interdicting-enemies-in-islamic-africa-dr-timothy-r-furnish/

"Finally, jihadist Salafis have been greatly influenced by Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi,[162] born in the West Bank in 1959; while before him “Salafism had mostly been a quietist version of Islam whose adherents were subservient to their rulers, al-Maqdisi used the tools that Salafism offered him against those very same rulers. This way, he turned the seemingly obedient Salafi ideology upside-down and revolutionised it.”[163]  Usama bin Ladin, Anwar al-Awlaki and Ayman al-Zawahiri have really only fine-tuned this approach, most notably in their zeal for attacking the “far enemy” (mainly the “Crusader” US, the font of all the ummah’s problems) rather than the “near” one (faux Muslim rulers).[164]"

http://www.hudson.org/research/11131-jordanian-salafism-and-the-jihad-in-syria
As the Zarqawi-driven bloodletting escalated in post-2003 Iraq, Maqdisi publicized his dissent in a letter from prison, al-munasira wa al-munasiha, “Aid and Counsel.”⁷ Maqdisi criticized Zarqawi’s jihad for its cost in Muslim lives (weighed against the likelihood of success), its targeting of civilians, and its use of suicide bombers. In July 2005, after his release from prison, Maqdisi escalated his criticisms in an interview with al-Jazeera. Maqdisi broadsided Zarqawi on a range of issues, rejecting his attacks on civilians, including Shia, and arguing that suicide bombers could only be used “exceptionally, in case of necessity,” and then only against military targets. Consistent with his “peaceful mission” in Jordan, Maqdisi supported jihad in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine against foreign powers, but said in Muslim countries Salafists should focus on preaching rather than “blowing up cinemas.”⁸



http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/saudi-arabia-debate-salafism-governance-isis.html
"Salafist movements share with ISIS the ideological references found in the books of Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn al-Qaim and Mohammad ibn Abdel Wahhab. Despite this, Salafist movements have divergent political stances. Some completely refuse all forms of rule that exist in the Islamic world and describe them as apostasy, rendering state employees and soldiers legitimate targets of bombings. Other movements, however, refuse all forms of rebellion against authorities, calling the perpetrators of such acts dissenters whose executions at the hands of authorities are legitimate. In between these two divergent views stand other movements with less extreme stances."


http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE72E0B620110315?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true
March 15, 2011: The spiritual leader of Algeria's influential Salafist movement has issued a 48-page fatwa, or religious decree, urging Muslims to ignore calls for change because he says that democracy is against Islam.

The fatwa by Sheikh Abdelmalek Ramdani, who lives in Saudi Arabia, comes at an opportune time for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika as Algerians watching protests in other Arab states have begun pushing their own political and economic demands.

"As long as the commander of the nation is a Muslim, you must obey and listen to him. Those who are against him are just seeking to replace him, and this is not licit," Ramdani wrote in the fatwa obtained by Reuters.

"During unrest, men and women are mixed, and this is illicit in our religion," said Ramdani, who claims several hundred thousand followers here.



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-islam.html?_r=0 
August 27, 2016: Yet some scholars on Islam and extremism, including experts on radicalization in many countries, push back against the notion that Saudi Arabia bears predominant responsibility for the current wave of extremism and jihadist violence. They point to multiple sources for the rise and spread of Islamist terrorism, including repressive secular governments in the Middle East, local injustices and divisions, the hijacking of the internet for terrorist propaganda, and American interventions in the Muslim world from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq. The 20th-century ideologues most influential with modern jihadists, like Sayyid Qutb of Egypt and Abul Ala Maududi of Pakistan, reached their extreme, anti-Western views without much Saudi input. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State despise Saudi rulers, whom they consider the worst of hypocrites.
“Americans like to have someone to blame — a person, a political party or country,” said Robert S. Ford, a former United States ambassador to Syria and Algeria. “But it’s a lot more complicated than that. I’d be careful about blaming the Saudis.”
While Saudi religious influence may be disruptive, he and others say, its effect is not monolithic. A major tenet of official Saudi Islamic teaching is obedience to rulers — hardly a precept that encourages terrorism intended to break nations. Many Saudi and Saudi-trained clerics are quietist, characterized by a devotion to scripture and prayer and a shunning of politics, let alone political violence.
....
After the terrorist attacks in Paris in November and in Brussels in March were tied to an Islamic State cell in Belgium, the Saudi history was the subject of several news media reports. Yet it was difficult to find any direct link between the bombers and the Saudi legacy in the Belgian capital.
.....
“Over time,” said Ms. Jones, who has visited or lived in Indonesia since the 1970s, the Saudi influence “has contributed to a more conservative, more intolerant atmosphere.” (President Obama, who lived in Indonesia as a boy, has remarked on the same phenomenon.) She said she believed money from private Saudi donors and foundations was behind campaigns in Indonesia against Shiite and Ahmadi Islam, considered heretical by Wahhabi teaching. Some well-known Indonesian religious vigilantes are Saudi-educated, she said.
But when Ms. Jones studied the approximately 1,000 people arrested in Indonesia on terrorism charges since 2002, she found only a few — “literally four or five” — with ties to Wahhabi or Salafi institutions. When it comes to violence, she concluded, the Saudi connection is “mostly a red herring.”
In fact, she said, there is a gulf between Indonesian jihadists and Indonesian Salafis who look to Saudi or Yemeni scholars for guidance. The jihadists accuse the Salafis of failing to act on their convictions; the Salafis scorn the jihadists as extremists.
....
A prominent cleric, Saad bin Nasser al-Shethri, had been stripped of a leadership position by the previous king, Abdullah, for condemning coeducation. King Salman restored Mr. Shethri to the job last year, not long after the cleric had joined the chorus of official voices criticizing the Islamic State. But Mr. Shethri’s reasoning for denouncing the Islamic State suggested the difficulty of change. The group was, he said, “more infidel than Jews and Christians.”

P

Madhkhalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madkhalism


Difference between Wahabism and Salafism

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/tm/single/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=528&#.VmfhF8ou9n4
"Wahhabism was a pared-down Islam that rejected modern influences, while Salafism sought to reconcile Islam with modernism. What they had in common is that both rejected traditional teachings on Islam in favor of direct, ‘fundamentalist’ reinterpretation.
 Although Saudi Arabia is commonly characterized as aggressively exporting Wahhabism, it has in fact imported pan-Islamic Salafism. Saudi Arabia founded and funded transnational organizations and headquartered them in the kingdom, but many of the guiding figures in these bodies were foreign Salafis. The most well known of these organizations was the World Muslim League, founded in Mecca in 1962, which distributed books and cassettes by al-Banna, Qutb and other foreign Salafi luminaries. Saudi Arabia successfully courted academics at al-Azhar University, and invited radical Salafis to teach at its own Universities. "

"Although Salafism and Wahhabism began as two distinct movements, Faisal's embrace of Salafi pan-Islamism resulted in cross-pollination between ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s teachings on tawhid, shirk and bid’a and Salafi interpretations of ahadith (the sayings of Muhammad). Some Salafis nominated ibn Abd al-Wahhab as one of the Salaf (retrospectively bringing Wahhabism into the fold of Salafism), and the Muwahideen began calling themselves Salafis." 


http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gause-saudi-arabia-extremism-blame-20160719-snap-story.html 
Saudi Wahhabism is profoundly quietist politically. It calls on Muslims to obey their rulers, as long as those rulers implement Islam, however imperfectly, in their society. (That is not particularly surprising for a state religion.) The success of the jihad in Afghanistan, however, lent a revolutionary political content to global Salafism for some of its adherents, like Osama bin Laden, which soon became a direct threat to the Saudi regime and all other Muslim governments around the world.
What had been a largely apolitical phenomenon of Muslims emulating Saudi Wahhabism in their personal lives became, for part of the global Salafi movement, an element of their political identity. Some continued on the path of violence, joining or sympathizing with Al Qaeda and then Islamic State. Others, including activists in Saudi Arabia, eschewed violence but criticized their governments for drifting away from the “true” Islam. Still other Salafis entered the democratic political sphere, winning parliamentary seats in Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt and elsewhere.
Salafism morphed into a religious movement with a number of political manifestations, only one of which was the blend of social conservatism and political quietism represented by the official Saudi variant.
This means that leaning on the Saudis to become “less Wahhabi” is unlikely to have much effect on jihadist movements like Al Qaeda and Islamic State. They and their followers look to other sources of political and doctrinal inspiration, not the official Saudi clerics. The jihadist groups draw some of their adherents from Saudi Arabia, but the vast majority of Saudi Muslims, including the vast majority of Saudi Wahhabis, reject these groups. Saudi Wahhabism can be a path toward jihadism, but it is hardly the only one. Tunisia, probably the most secular state in the Arab world and the one relative success story of the Arab Spring, has sent more jihadists to Syria than has Saudi Arabia. The Europeans and Americans attracted by the propaganda of Islamic State did not grow up in the milieu of official Saudi Wahhabism.
Global Salafism is now unmoored from its Saudi origins.



Salafis against takfiri vigilante violence

http://www.islamagainstextremism.com/reports/ibn-taymiyyah-the-takfiri-kharijites-and-the-issue-of-rebellion-08.cfm
"However the contemporary takfiri groups have ignored the fact that the vast majority of the Salaf prohibited from this type of revolt, even though some of the notables from the people of knowledge fell into this. So out of deceit, they attempt to justify this manhaj of revolt in the current times (which they took from Vladimir Lenin through Sayyid Qutb in the name of "social justice"), with the excuse that there is a precedent from the people of knowledge from the Salaf - illustrating thereby, their blindness in both vision and insight. "

 
Salafi's concept of jihad

http://www.islamagainstextremism.com/articles/qivwrvs-the-extremist-takfiris-and-jihadis-who-influenced-michael-adebolajo-in-the-woolwich-killing.cfm
"jihad in Islam is not "blind" and "absolute" and has principles, conditions and requirements and it is only for the Scholars and Rulers to make decisions in grave and serious matters affecting the state and its subjects. From such conditions are: a) that this jihad is against a warring, transgressing enemy with whom there is no previous peace treaty, covenant, guarantee and the likes b) that fighting has to be behind the ruler or military leader and requires his permission except in the case of sudden attack where subjects must defend themselves as a matter of emergency, though they are subsequently required to consult immediately with the ruler and refer affairs back to those in authority c) there must be sufficient military strength to participate in the war, d) there must be a clear, distinct military leadership behind whom the war is made and not mass confusion with lots of separate factions. These are just some of the numerous requirements for jihad and it is not for any common person or preacher to start announcing jihad to the people at large as this is chaos and confusion and corruption. However, this is what is done by these extremist preachers. They blur everything and do not make rulings upon actual ground realities and are driven by raw emotion and what they see of injustice and oppression to fall into another type of oppression - which is oppressing themselves and others by faking scholarship and pretending to be fit and capable of giving verdicts in grave and serious matters that can affect the security and welfare of whole nations of Muslims."