EMQ » October–December 2021 » Volume 57 Issue 4
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder, EMQLibraryInstitution”]By Mohamed-Ali Adraoui
Oxford University Press, 2020
204 pages
US$29.96
Reviewed by David Cashin, professor of Intercultural Studies at Columbia International University, Columbia, South Carolina.
For many in the western world familiar with Salafi-Jihadism the concept of “quietistic Salafis” would seem a contradiction. Mohamed-Ali Adraoui introduces us – primarily through ethnographic interviews – to the growing community of Salafis who have cut off all connections to “political Islam.” Their “socialization,” which has converted a significant number of non-Muslim French youth, involves a withdrawal from corrupt French society and the establishing of a lifestyle “to recover the lost purity” (xviii).
The prose of this work is exceedingly dense, but Adraoui’s ethnographic interviews are light and revealing. For any worker seeking insights into the attraction of this lifestyle in Europe and specifically France, this is an essential read. Adraoui sees the heyday of Muslim Brotherhood Islam and its political agendas as corresponding to a period of “modernism,” while the quietistic Salafis are on the rise as they follow the “post-modern” pattern of hyper-individualism and seek to regain a sense of community. The rejection of French society in the suburbs where Islam is already the ethos, is the context of Adraoui’s interviews with those converted out of French secularism. He concludes, “The Salafis embody the gravity of postmodernity’s codes and the decline of the logics that used to underpin the State…” (196).
This rejection of French society takes its strongest expression in the concept of “hijra” – the voluntary abandonment of French society – in order to return to the pure soil of the Muslim world. Adraoui notes that for most, this is only an occasionally practiced ideal. The main hijra takes place through a lifestyle that “effects a partial rupture with his environment” (80).
In the final pages, Adraoui considers where this movement may go. His interviews contain many expressions of contempt for and hatred towards the environment of secular France. Adraoui sees the potential for this to turn back to political and militant perspectives. This he calls “a clearly militant vision of preaching” (194), although one can see the potential for something much more forceful.
Adraoui’s viewpoints are balanced by reading Elham Manea’s book, The Perils of Non-violent Islamism, where she identifies major problems with human rights within this community and sees the potential for this movement to turn violent. Although she is a practicing Muslim, she is likely to be called an “Islamophobe.” Read both books.
For Further Reading
Manea, Elham, and Russell A. Berman. The Perils of Non-violent Islamism. Telos Press Publishing, 2021.
