The Rise Of The Salafis

In the 13 months that Mohammed Abdel-Rahman has been protesting outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo, he has become so familiar to American officials that they sometimes stop at his small open-air sit-in to exchange pleasantries with him.

Never mind that he is the son of Omar Abdel-Rahman, better known as the Blind Sheik, jailed in North Carolina for his role in a plot to bomb several targets in the U.S., or that Mohammed himself was captured in Afghanistan 10 years later and imprisoned in Egypt until the fall of 2010, or even that he is a prominent member of the fundamentalist Salafi movement, which rejects, sometimes with violence, most modern and Western mores. Sitting with a motley group of supporters on blue plastic mats under banners demanding his father’s release, the balding 39-year-old with a scraggly beard looks entirely unthreatening, even avuncular.

Abdel-Rahman jokes that his sit-in helps enhance the embassy’s safety because it blocks one of the roads to the walled compound. The security guards leave him be, he says, “because we’re not causing trouble.” But he was on hand when the troublemakers arrived at the embassy in the late afternoon of Sept. 11 to protest the YouTube trailer of a scurrilous anti-Islam movie made in California. Like Abdel-Rahman, many of the protesters were Salafis. He asked them to use another approach road because “we didn’t want any problems here.” Such is the respect he commands that they complied. He says he joined the protesters briefly, but when arguments broke out among the newcomers–some wanted to break into the compound, others simply to hold a sit-in–he decided to return to his blue mats.

The protests swelled, got louder and then got out of hand; the faction that wanted to breach the embassy walls won out. Screaming anti-American slogans, some men tore down the U.S. flag flying over the building and burned it. The problems Abdel-Rahman had been trying to avoid had just begun: over the next two days, Salafi mobs organized aggressive protests against the YouTube video at the embassy and elsewhere across Egypt. President Mohamed Morsy, plainly more mindful of Salafi wrath than U.S. indignation, was slow to condemn the assault on the embassy. Only on the third day, after a stern telephonic talking-to by President Obama, did Morsy’s Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, seize the initiative from the Salafis by holding its own demonstrations in Tahrir Square.

Abdel-Rahman and the flag burners at the embassy represent the quandary facing fundamentalist Islam after the revolution that toppled the Arab world’s most durable dictators: Should they take advantage of new freedoms to express themselves peacefully or use the familiar tools of indignation and religious rage to disrupt the transition to democracy and build their own political power? How the Salafis answer that question–and how moderate Muslim political parties respond–may determine the fate of the Arab Spring.

In the two weeks following Sept. 11, Muslims of various sects and political groupings launched dozens of protests around the Muslim world. But it was the Salafis, at the heart of the largest and most violent demonstrations, who won the more-outraged-than-thou contest. A Salafi militant group known as Ansar al-Shari’a is thought to have conducted the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Salafi-led demonstrations in Tunis led to the deaths of four Tunisians.

Like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, other Islamists scrambled to grab the mike from the Salafis. In Pakistan, the government declared Sept. 21 a holiday, essentially to allow people to protest, and even nominally moderate political parties like the ruling Pakistan People’s Party joined the chorus of indignation. Inevitably, riots ensued, leading to at least 25 deaths. But there, too, it was the Salafis who scored the most political points: they had dragged virtually the entire Pakistani political spectrum several degrees to the right.

The demonstration of Salafi street power set off alarm bells in Muslim countries, nowhere more than in the those liberated by the revolutions of 2011, where the fundamentalists seem determined to drown out all other voices in the political conversation. “We are dealing with a real danger, a threat,” Moncef Marzouki, Tunisia’s liberal President, tells TIME. “[Salafism] is like a cancer. The more we wait, the more it becomes extremely difficult to cure.”

If the democratically elected governments of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen represent the flowering of the Arab Spring, the newly assertive Salafis are its weeds, flourishing in soil fertilized by free expression and poorly tended by weak governments. Many in the region and in Western capitals alike worry that if left unchecked, the Salafis will choke the life out of the new democracies by forcing their puritanical and intolerant brand of Islam on a timorous populace and its craven leaders.

The rise of the Salafis, abetted by powerful financial backing from countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, also threatens to undermine the Obama Administration’s delicate efforts to build new relationships with the Arab Spring states. Relations with Egypt, long the linchpin of U.S. foreign policy in the region, have already been damaged by the Salafis’ success in pushing Morsy into a political corner. Members of Congress are calling for U.S. aid to Egypt to be reduced or halted, and Obama was left to conclude, in an interview with the Spanish-language TV channel Telemundo, that Egypt was neither an ally nor an enemy.

The fundamentalists are also complicating political and military calculations in the Arab Spring’s unfinished revolution in Syria. The arrival of more and more Salafi fighters from the far corners of the Muslim world has given the rebellion against President Bashar Assad a distinctly sectarian color. This allows the dictator’s propaganda to portray the rebels as religious fanatics determined to eliminate all minority faiths, and it contributes to Western reluctance to fully embrace and empower the anti-Assad forces.

The Past Is the Future

There is no reliable estimate of the number of Salafis; most experts agree they make up a tiny minority of the world’s 1.4 billion Sunni Muslims. Salafism is more of a philosophy, a way of life, than a religious or political movement with a leadership hierarchy. Adherents don’t follow a single figure but instead rely on scholars both modern and ancient for advice on how to conduct themselves.

Salafis believe that Muslims have become polluted by modern and Western ideas and that the faith needs reforming. The best way to do this is to go back to the faith’s roots and emulate the austere piety of the Prophet Muhammad and his early followers, known collectively as salaf, which translates loosely to “the predecessors.” The most literalist Salafis strive to live as if frozen in time.

According to the Salafi mind-set, life is serious, and there’s no place for frivolity: music, cinema, television and most other forms of entertainment are taboo. A woman’s place is at home; if obliged to go out, she must be covered from head to foot. Salafis view most Muslim sects as heresies, scarcely less contemptible than other religions, but converts are welcome.

Many Salafis regard the West, and especially the U.S., as the implacable enemy of Islam and see the YouTube video and the Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as proof of a systematic program to undermine the Muslim faith and steal resources God gave the Arab peoples. For some extremist Salafis–Osama bin Laden was one–that’s reason enough to wage jihad on the West. But for most Salafis, the best protection of Islam comes from purifying its believers.

Until recently, Salafis didn’t care much for politics: any form of government, democratic or dictatorial, was inadequate, since only God could be sovereign. Adherents were more interested in how Muslims thought and behaved than in how they were governed. Laws written by men were meaningless in the face of the Koran, which contained all the rules by which men must live. Pressed to explain how the Koran could be so strictly followed in the modern world, Salafis cited the puritanical doctrines of scholars stretching back more than 1,000 years to Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who forbade the use of reason in any reading of the holy book.

But many Salafis have seized on the Arab Spring as a chance to shrug off the taboo against democracy. Ed Husain, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says some fundamentalists “see elections as a way of encouraging good and preventing evil and thereby … slowly changing society toward an Islamic state.” In Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen, Salafis want to have a major input–and, if possible, the decisive one–in the creation of new constitutions. And their objective is no secret. “It’s very simple. We want Shari’a,” says Abdel-Rahman, referring to Koranic law. “Shari’a in economy, in politics, in judiciary, in our borders and our foreign relations.”

From Misfits to Mainstream

A generation ago, Salafis were the religious oddballs of the Muslim world, mocked by the majority as much for their sartorial peculiarities as for their righteousness. In the 1950s and ’60s, the popular Arab perception of a Salafi was that of a God botherer who handed out pamphlets outside the local mosque on Friday and chided fellow Muslims for straying from Islam’s “true” path. In Egyptian movies of the era, comedians made fun of the Salafi’s unkempt beard as well as his dishdasha, or tunic, which stopped a few inches short of his ankles. The Salafis’ retrograde worldview was widely scorned by Arab elites entranced by the secular, modern alternative propagated by leaders like Egypt’s charismatic President Gamal Abdel Nasser. But while they were scoffed at in modern Muslim countries like Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan, the bearded men were making powerful friends elsewhere. A new elite was rising in the oil-rich Arabian peninsula, where the dominant Islamic school, known as Wahhabism after the 18th century scholar Mohammed ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, was a close facsimile of Salafi thought.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Salafis started receiving money from wealthy patrons in countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar. Soon they were no longer distributing pamphlets outside the neighborhood mosque: they had built mosques of their own, opened seminaries and were able to hand out glossy literature. Many Muslim countries seeking economic aid from the Gulf states regarded the newly emboldened Salafi and Wahhabi proselytizers as the strings attached to the largesse. Ironically, many of the same governments brutally suppressed homegrown Islamist movements, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, that represented a more immediate political threat to ruling elites.

Many proselytizers didn’t even have to travel abroad in search of a new flock: the booming economies of the Arab Gulf states drew millions of foreign workers, many of them Muslims. After years of working in Riyadh or Sharjah, some Indians, Filipinos, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis returned home as Salafis.

The Salafi stock among Muslims skyrocketed after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when thousands of mujahedin flocked to the country, ready to protect Islam from the godless communists. Many of the holy warriors, including bin Laden, were Salafis. As tales of their reckless bravery spread and they were cheered on by Western nations eager to see the Soviets defeated, they developed a fearsome image as a kind of warrior monk.

When they returned victorious from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, some of the mujahedin began to question the long-held tradition of steering clear of politics. Having helped the Taliban turn Afghanistan into a quasi-Salafi state, they dreamed of doing the same at home. They had little patience for Islamist social and political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, which had forsworn violent jihad, the rallying cry of the mujahedin.

Alarmed by the Salafis’ new ambitions, Arab dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali began to crack down, killing, jailing and torturing thousands of Salafis, many of whom had no connection to the mujahedin. State propaganda portrayed Salafis as no different from the Brotherhood; many Western observers conflated the two–and still do. Some mujahedin fled back to Afghanistan to join up with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and turn their sights on the “far enemy” in the West. In Arab lands, old-school Salafis remained, some forming alliances with ruling despots, others avoiding politics altogether and concentrating on cleansing people’s souls.

Sprung by the Spring

As the most important inflection point in modern Arab history dawned last year, the Salafis were of two minds: Should they or should they not join the Arab Spring uprising against the aging dictators? Most sat out the revolution, arguing that it was a form of politics; some cited ancient doctrines forbidding revolution against Muslim rulers, however tyrannical. “There were many who said at the time that the revolution was a mistake,” says Mohammed Abdel-Rahman. He disagreed and claims to have participated in the anti-Mubarak protests in Cairo. But there certainly were some bearded men among the protesters in Tahrir Square during the heady days of February 2011.

The mostly secular revolutions that removed the likes of Mubarak, Ben Ali and Gaddafi also sprang the Salafis loose–in some cases literally: hundreds were freed from the dictators’ jails. Others were unshackled from self-imposed political abstinence. Within weeks, Salafis went from declaring elections haram (forbidden) to forming political parties. Freedom also allowed the Salafis to launch newspapers, magazines, radio stations and satellite-TV channels, the better to rally the faithful and seek new converts. (It was a Salafi channel, Al-Nas, that drew Egyptians’ attention to the YouTube video.) In Salafi mosques, where sermons no longer needed to be approved by regime-appointed officials, preachers could fulminate against secular influences without fear of punishment.

In Egypt, the combination of media and mosque helped propel the Salafis to an impressive showing in parliamentary elections last winter: an assortment of Salafi parties collectively got more than 20% of the vote, second only to Morsy’s Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. But the Salafi triumph was short-lived: parliament was summarily dismissed by a court order that many suspected was engineered by the interim military junta.

After Morsy outmaneuvered the generals to wrest control of the country, the Salafis expected him to give them Cabinet positions appropriate to their status as the second largest political faction. When he shut them out, they were infuriated. The anti-Islam YouTube video gave them the opportunity they needed to embarrass him and show they could still control the street, which remains the locus of Egyptian politics in the absence of a parliament.

In the other Arab Spring countries, the Salafis fared poorly in elections. Tunisia’s Brotherhood equivalent, the Ennahda, easily trounced fundamentalist factions; in Libya, even the most prominent Salafi, former Guantnamo Bay prisoner Abdelhakim Belhaj, failed to win a seat. In Yemen, the fundamentalists agreed to let a secular ex-general stand unopposed in February’s presidential election but now complain that he doesn’t consult them enough. Having failed in free elections, the Salafis in these countries have sought other ways to make themselves heard. “They’re disgruntled, and so they’re looking to destabilize these governments,” says Michele Dunne, director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

Even before the anti-Islam video came along, fundamentalists in Libya were challenging the government by destroying ancient shrines of Muslim holy men because, in the Salafi view, worshipping at such places is tantamount to polytheism, Islam’s gravest sin. In Tunisia, they have been demanding that women be allowed to wear the veil on university campuses.

The elected governments seem unwilling or unable to fight back. Political analysts say newly elected leaders like Morsy are loath to act against the fundamentalists for several reasons: the fear of being labeled anti-Islamic, the risk of being compared to the oppressive dictators they replaced and a desire to conserve political capital for other, more pressing problems like reviving moribund economies and reforming governments. Rachid Ghannouchi, the head of Tunisia’s Ennahda, agrees that “the Salafi threat [is] one of the threats that face the country,” but it’s plainly not his party’s top priority. President Marzouki, whose role is largely ceremonial, says the ruling Islamists want to wait until next year’s general elections, when they hope to gain more power, before confronting the fundamentalists. But as the Salafis across the Arab Spring countries have demonstrated in recent weeks, it is they who decide the timetable for confrontation.