Introduction

Contemporary Salafism is an example of the globalization of the Religious. From the societies of the Gulf to many Western countries and from Indonesia to Azerbaijan and Nigeria, fundamentalist and puritanical forms of the practice of Islam are today so successful that they have become objects of public debate. This is particularly the case across Western Europe. The legislative proposals aimed at banning it in some European countries—France and the Netherlands—show that Salafism gives rise to considerable fears on the political stage, in the media, and the security community.

This article sheds light on the Salafist question in the West, that is to say, on a fundamentalist, puritanical and radical offer of Islam born outside Western borders but increasingly visible in this socio-political space, which is mainly characterized by liberal and secular values. Muslims are a minority, whose presence is linked to waves of migration dating back to the last century and who are over-represented among the socio-economically marginalized groups and among the younger demographics. Within Muslim communities, where great cultural diversity exists, Salafism (itself plural and fragmented, as we shall see) is most often synonymous with rupture and opposition to the dominant values in European societies. This is an undeniable reality, but one that needs to be supplemented by a more detailed analysis of the social profiles opting for this vision of Islam at a certain point in their lives. Articulating the discourse and practices of the actors with their social trajectories and the reasons why they say they identify with Salafism is the most objective manner to take stock of a phenomenon that has certainly not finished challenging Western societies.

As a religious offer that is both globalized and rooted in local realities, Salafism embodies a narrative that adapts to different environments and knows how to propose a simple and radical narrative to different social, cultural, and political problems. To understand Salafism (Lauzière, 2015) and its influence in certain spheres within contemporary Western societies is to question the capacity of the Religious to structure a counterculture that is both local and global and to propose adapted and clear responses to diverse individual and collective tensions at a time when religious utopia often fills the gaps left by a seemingly failing modernity.

Defining Salafism

Addressing the question of this religious form requires first of all some definitions. Salafism can be placed in the history of fundamentalist and puritanical movements. More precisely, it is a revivalist understanding of Islam. The Salafists argue that they are part of a genealogy of authenticity. The prophet Muhammad, through his apostolate, revealed a belief to the world, delivered a message, and, in so doing, sealed the prophecy, which had begun with Adam. Therefore, if authenticity is man-made (in his person, character, and behavior as explicated in the Sunna), it did not disappear following Muhammad’s death, since his contemporaries and the generations that followed them remain imbued with his model. While many ways of apprehending and understanding Islam have emerged since the beginning, only one is said to have remained faithful to Muhammad’s call, namely the Salafist one, which seeks to follow in the footsteps of the al-Salaf al-Salih (the Pious Ancestors) and is, consequently, the repository of the only true way of being Muslim today. Referring therefore to the first Muslims as paradigmatic models, the Salafists see the early days of Islam as the Golden Age whose characteristics must be reproduced. The first Muslims were the Pious Ancestors because, having learned Islam from the mouth of Muhammad himself, they are, in this sense, a source of imitation after the Prophet.

In spite of the diversity of interpretations of Salafism today (Meijer, 2009; Cavatorta & Merone, 2017), this common drive to re-establish a model of belief, practice, and supposedly authentic society highlights that it is about fundamentalism (a return to the sources), puritanism (desire for purification), and orthodoxy/orthopraxis (search for a right belief/practice). It is therefore easier to understand why this religious offer, in contexts that are largely secularized and modernist and where individual liberties and democratic systems dominate, is perceived today as one of the most radical in relation to the dominant values of Western societies (Ata & Ali, 2018). For example, as early as 2005, in France, the Minister of Labor Gérard Larcher, in an article in Le Figaro dated Thursday, 17 March 2005, used the term “Salafist” to attack people who have a too rigid and radical reading of the Labour Code, thus illustrating the now inescapable visibility of this offer of Islam at the heart of European societies: “We have a Salafist reading of the Labor Code, as if it were untouchable, definitively uninterpretable, except only by the Ulama of the Court of Cassation.” The rigidity and radicalism of Salafism are transported outside the religious context to describe practices and beliefs of ideological opponents deemed unreasonable and potentially violent, demonstrating the pervasive negative image Salafism has acquired.

Whether it is clothing (the full veil worn by some Salafist women), or a refusal to conform to the social customs of the majority (a man refusing to shake a woman’s hand), or radical sermons preached in a mosque or in the virtual space or even certain public demonstrations in opposition to specific public decisions deemed to be anti-Islam, the face of the Salafist has become that of the privileged enemy of media, political leaders, or security services.

Sociological outlines of Salafist communities in Europe

It is extremely difficult to count the number of Muslims in Western societies who would identify with Salafist norms. Because Salafism is not an organized political movement with a large membership, nor a church organized around an objective and with clear affiliation rules, it often escapes detailed analyses. It is, in fact, a reticular religiosity in that the sociological structure most often observed is that of a preacher promoting, physically or on the web, religious exegeses to small communities and reproducing in turn norms circulating both physically (books, pamphlets, audio recordings) and orally through courses and conferences held both in a mosque and in the home. Through these micro-theaters of Salafist preaching, some countries have experienced since the 1990s, at a time when a wave of globalization of the imaginary took place on the Internet and younger generations, often coming from Muslim countries, reached adulthood, a growing visibility of this religiosity. Thus, a real Salafist counterculture has emerged in Europe in specific places of worship around which small Salafist communities are organized, united by social norms and codes which contrast with the social customs of the majority and are connected instead to clerics most often established in Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia. At the same time, such counterculture has designed a way of life within a larger society that deliberately challenges or rejects the dominant culture’s behaviors, values, and norms (Roszak, 1995). Despite the considerable political and mediatic focus on the growth of Salafism in Europe, France, Great Britain, Germany (Steinberg, 2013), the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, and Italy have only a few Muslims of Salafist orientation and the latter represent only an extreme minority in relation to the total Muslim population living in Europe. There is no large mosque in Europe where it can be said that the imam officiating there is of Salafist orientation. The most common configuration is that of a rather small place of worship on the fringes of city centers (Rosengard in Malmö, Trappes near Paris, Bradford near Leeds) where large Muslim communities live and where relatively small Salafist groups engage in daily preaching to their families and friends, organizing events in mosques or distributing books. The aim is as much to make Salafism known and accepted as to distance itself from other forms of Islam such as Tabligh, Sufis, or the Muslim Brotherhood considered deviant and to distance itself from the rest of society.

On the level of the sociological composition of these puritan communities, three broad characteristics deserve to be highlighted. Firstly, Salafism is mainly influential among the younger generations, more precisely adolescents and young adults, even if, for obvious reasons linked to natural aging, by becoming established in life and by inscribing their fundamentalism in the long term, this religiosity today presents a somewhat older face. Nevertheless, it is young men and women who identify most with this radical ethic, and one hardly ever finds representatives of first-generation immigrants from the Muslim world to Europe in Salafi groups. Formulating their relationship to the Muslim religion in more conflicting terms than their parents and feeding off the relative frustrations linked to their often-difficult relationship with their social environment, the younger generations have thus become actors in the religious debate (Roy, 2017). However, the religiousness they adopt in their social environment pushes them to recognize themselves in more intransigent forms, the traditional forms of Islam being disqualified morally and identity-wise for not being sufficiently “pure” or being too “conciliatory” with European societies, which supposedly embody the negation of “true” Islamic values. This is even more obvious if we look at the most violent forms of transformative Salafism, as shown by the socio-economic and demographic profile of European jihadists leaving for conflicts in the Middle East or perpetrating terrorist acts in Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, or the Netherlands (Hoffman, 2017; Nesser, 2018). There is a clear trend towards “juvenile jihadism” today when compared to past generations, with very young adults (under 25 years of age) now the majority of those perpetrating acts of violence (Neumann, 2016).

Secondly, adherence to Salafism is most often explained by those who embraced it as a desire to react to a form of perversion of the world. From this point of view, Salafism presents itself as a “pure” religion and not just one religious tradition among others. For its followers, this means that it is an exclusive path. There can be no question of recognizing another identity, at least theoretically. Life in society passes through the constant prism of the licit and illicit on the basis of which Islam “of the origins” is supposed to have taught. In this, there is indeed the desire to constitute a new authority in contemporary Islam whose vocation is to exercise a magisterium over those co-religionists who are not yet Salafist and to lead them towards Salafist beliefs and practices. The only community that is therefore recognized by the followers is that of Muslim believers, among whom only one group (the Salafists) has a monopoly on authenticity. The Salafist communities are thus relatively comparable to religious sects that constantly seek to purify their existence and get rid of the “impurities” present in European society. A striking example is the ban on voting, for example, which is most often prohibited within Salafist communities in the Western context because taking part in democratic elections by supporting a candidate or a party would mean adhering to an “unholy” system: human beings cannot decide on laws, which are divine and contained in the sources of Islam.

Finally, the analysis of the sociology of Salafism suggests a specificity of this religiosity linked to the place and role of converts, i.e., people born outside a Muslim family. Researchers have found that Salafism is the most open branch in terms of ethnic origins, especially when it comes to the place of converts. Unlike the Muslim currents strongly linked to the countries of origin of immigrant populations (Morocco, Turkey, or Algeria) or to more political and organized visions designed to influence public debate, such as associations close to the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafism has a large share of converts. Attracted by the message of simplicity and equality for which a person born outside a Muslim background can very well become an imam or teach to all provided he or she has religious knowledge, converts represent an average of 25–30% within Salafi groups depending on the country (Adraoui, 2020; Galonnier, 2022; Hamid, 2016; Olsson, 2016; Turner, 2019). This can be seen for instance in the matrimonial strategies of the Salafists who seek, in the choice of spouse, fidelity to the principles of orthodoxy and not common national origin or the fulfillment of parental desires.

Towards a typology of Salafism in and through the European context?

Preaching (Da ‘wa) is at the heart of socialization in Salafist communities. In order to defend and promote an “authentic” understanding of the oneness of God (tawhid), the need to return to a fundamentalist understanding of the Qur’an (Donegani, 1993: 406), the Sunna, and the trace of the Pious Ancestors (al-Athar),Footnote 1 Salafist communities envisage political means and ends that may not only diverge but may sometimes be antagonistic. In order to purify their religiosity from what appears to be “blameworthy innovations” (al-Bidaʿ) or even “unbelief” (al-Kufr), Salafists, whether they are daily followers, clerics responsible for giving religious advice and organizing preaching or more politicized or even violent activists, are led to conceptualize and declare licit (Halal) or illicit (Haram) methods of action, political principles, or objectives that lead them to formulate diverging visions of Salafism that may come into conflict with one another. Thus, in addition to a fundamentalist paradigm, Salafism is also a space for debate, sometimes virulent, which can go as far as proclaiming anathemas on certain points, since the desire to return to “authentic” Islam pushes towards ever greater puritanism.

It follows that several typologies have been set up in recent years to highlight similarities and differences between contemporary understandings of Salafism. The most famous of these is undoubtedly that of Quintan Wiktorowicz, (2006), whose main contribution is to distinguish current forms of Salafism in light of their political modality, particularly with regard to the question of the relationship to violence, political activism, and power. All these conceptualizations of the necessary return to the Pious Ancestors are based on the radical definition of Divine Unity (al-tawhid), of the struggle against “innovation” (al-Bidʿa) in religious matters and of the principle of Allegiance and Disavowal (al-Walaʾ wa-al-Baraʾ).Footnote 2 Profound differences have emerged on the content of these notions, contributing to the fragmentation of the contemporary Salafism, but also to the ideological and even sociological porosity between the different currents claiming to be part of this revivalism.

The typology previously cited shows three branches of Salafism. The first is consciously violent and makes an almost systematically vehement and insurrectionary reading of the concept of jihad. This concept echoes the dynamic of leading Muslims to conform with the spirit and the letter (however much it is discussed) of their religion. Embodied in movements such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, this vision disqualifies politics in the institutional sense of the term (parties, elections, representative institutions making laws) in favor of a violent strategy of building a new political order—the Caliphate. The second branch shares the same objective of re-establishing exclusive sovereignty for all Muslims, but through a national rather than transnational political ethics, which legitimizes electoral competition where possible and the creation of a political party to defend and promote the policies and interests of Salafists in what is a competitive ideological market.Footnote 3 This does not mean legitimizing democracy, as a Salafist electoral victory would simply lead the Salafist party to dismantle democratic institutions. The third version, for its part, looks at politics with distrust and subordination. Muslims must focus their efforts to make society evolve towards more conformity to religious injunctions on purely religious preaching, far from any political activism. This approach must, according to these “quietist” Salafists, nevertheless take into account a major constraint, namely the preservation of the social order without which there are no longer any religious practice and security for the Muslim community (umma). In this way, any regime that does not explicitly deny Islam (where this religion is in the majority) must be obeyed. In a minority Muslim context, as the European one, the most commonly encouraged “orthodox” practice is “beneficial migration” (al-hijra), the aim of which is to separate morally and physically the believer from an environment that is hostile to Islam, thereby running a serious risk of perversion and even perdition for the faith.

The visibility as well as the unquestionable influence of Salafist norms and the Salafist imagination in many societies over the last few years highlights the emergence of another typological form, which renders Wiktorowicz’s classification less pertinent to understand contemporary Salafism. Because of the diversification of forms of adherence to Salafism, it is necessary today to consider Salafist sensibilities and not only clearly identifiable currents. This is due to the ideological dilution of the revivalist objective in the narrative of different groups that apply their Salafism in everyday life according to increasingly different practices and modalities in the economic sphere, in the political field, or on the basis of specific cultural codes. Furthermore, with the advent of a virtual universe in which identities and mobilizations are in a de-territorialized within the framework of all-encompassing activism without a specific political agenda, other communities claiming the Salafist way of life and references (clerics, concepts) have gained notoriety. If, in the long run, the search for exclusive political sovereignty for all Muslims is sought, it is not a strategy of conquering power but of entering the public space (here virtual) that characterizes this understanding of Salafism. All these dynamics have thus reinforced Salafism as a symbol of rupture and opposition with the social and political environment as well as producing a dilution effect of this matrix in that it is now difficult to speak of currents with a clear agenda and an identifiable strategy. At the global level today, Salafism has become a language of opposition rather than representing a homogenous ideological offer.

A typology in the Western context would therefore consist of differentiating three Salafist modalities of opposition and reaction to dominant social, political, and cultural values. If it is always a matter of preaching with the objective and leading the social order towards ever greater moral, identity, and legal fidelity to the Islamic norm understood in a fundamentalist mode, the relationship to Western order (or disorder) is what underpins the main differences between Salafist communities in Europe and North America today. Three modes of reaction can be observed.

First of all, the existence of a “preservation” Salafism must be emphasized, whose avowed objective is to maintain the political order. This means that this vision may actively seek the preservation of a regime, state, government, or political system even if it is based on secular and liberal values. Politics here is a space that should not be entered at all or else all will be lost and create sedition. Religious morality suffices to be an “authentic” believer. It is not necessary to found a party, to generate physical violence, or to occupy the public space in a voluntary and self-serving manner in order to influence political decisions within a country or more generally social debates. The defense of Islam is in this case individualized and localized and it is not imperative to convert the greatest number.

A second Salafism which is visible today is that of “transformation through violence.” The point for this type of Salafism in Europe is attempting to exert radical and extreme influence on public decisions such as a state’s foreign policy and mobilizing all Muslims around this agenda. Political and violent conflict is the rule and there is no question of entering into a long-term arrangement with the political system in place as is the case with preservationist Salafism. Transformation Salafism is short-sighted and claims to be built around the dichotomy between “true Muslims” and “enemies of Islam,” with those in between having to make their choice about which side they are on. The place of power is thought to be potentially empty, and this category of Salafists considers occupying it, unlike for preservationists, for whom religious morality is the individual quest for orthodoxy. This Salafism of transformation refers to an ethic of change from above and therefore justifies calling this effort to change through violence the structures of the state in the European context of jihad (Egerton, 2011). Europe could, in this perspective, one day become a Muslim continent, whereas the Salafism of preservation acknowledges the difference in culture and religion between its followers and Western societies.

Finally, there is a “subversive” Salafism for which the quest for political power is not a priority. It is more a social and cultural movement whose objective is visibility in the public space through entryism. Present in several European countries such as Belgium with Sharia4Belgium, the UK with Sharia4UK, or France with Forsane al-ʿIzzaFootnote 4, Footnote 5 this Salafism favors actions such as demonstrations in front of the American Embassy in Paris or London, street prayers or prayers in public squares, and the distribution of leaflets in order to make others aware of their agenda or, on the contrary, condemn the actions of a particular government or, more generally, the dominant mores in Western countries. Preaching in the purely religious sense is somewhat neglected to impose what can be labeled “militant visibility” on the rest of society, but not necessarily to seek power. The objective, despite the use of provocative slogans intended to attract attention, seems more to further the polarization of opposing camps than the mobilization around a common political project and the conquest of power. Preaching here is structured around small militant groups that publicize less their faith than their grievances about what the West represents in political or symbolic terms.

Salafism in Europe or European Salafism? Islamic contemporary radicalism between globalization and localism

Although there are no statistical studies on the exact number of Muslims belonging to the currents generally considered fundamentalist in European societies, several scholars agree that Salafism is the main “face” of radical Islam in this part of the world today. The situation though varies from country to country due to the religious latitude given to believers, the fear of radical forms, and the success of Salafist preaching on the ground. Furthermore, cross-country divergences exist when it comes to the profiles of Salafist actors and established communities. For example, Salafism has recruited its main followers in societies such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany from Maghrebi communities, in addition to the large and regular proportion of converts to Islam found in all European countries. The Salafist orientation is fairly present among the younger generations from Bosnian or Albanian immigration in Switzerland or Scandinavia or Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigration in the UK. On the other hand, Salafism remains marginal among communities of Turkish origin established in Germany and the rest of Europe, illustrating the fact that Salafism is the Islam of globalization, far from organizations linked to specific countries that wish to export Islamic national forms to their diasporas established abroad.

Salafism in Europe is first of all the result of a transnational dynamic, thanks to the policies Saudi Arabia implemented. The Saudis have done the most since the second half of the twentieth century to export and make Salafist norms visible throughout the Muslim world and beyond (Al-Rasheed, 2010). In Saudi Arabia, because of the social contract on which the state is based and the enormous financial resources at its disposal, the monarchy has, for several decades, been at the origin of two institutions oriented towards the export of the Salafist imaginary. These are the Islamic World League, founded in 1962 to strengthen Saudi Arabia’s place in the Muslim world at a time when Arab nationalism was a serious ideological challenger and competitor, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (now the Islamic Cooperation Organization), established in 1969 to defend the Islamic identity and practice of this religion throughout the world. The Saudi monarchy is among the main players in this entity. This institutional networking of the global Islamic field has had consequences as far as Europe, where for several decades numerous places of worship, conferences, distribution of books, and funding for religious training have enabled Salafist ideas to develop and be heard. As an example, the offices of the Islamic World League in France were opened in 1974 and have enabled the financing of places of worship, including that of Mantes-la-Jolie near Paris, where part of the French headquarters of the League is located. In Switzerland, the Geneva Mosque and the Geneva Islamic Cultural Association are also financed by the League. In Belgium, the Muslim Executive, which is the main structure representing the faithful in that country, is partly composed of people from mosques founded with the support of the League. Many young European Muslims have also been trained, through scholarships and various forms of social aid such as housing in the canons of Salafism through the League since the 1980s. The Islamic universities of Medina and Mecca (Farquhar, 2016) have received several thousand people from Europe, some of whom became imams or preachers spreading a Salafist version of Islam linked to Saudi religious structures. These include the role and significance of the heritage of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the imam who in 1744 entered into a political-religious alliance with Muhammad Ibn Saud, the ancestor of the present reigning family (Mouline, 2014). It is for this reason that one often speaks of “Wahhabism” to describe Saudi-inspired Salafism, although this name is strongly criticized by Saudi clerics, who claim to practice “authentic” Islam without any particular allegiance to a particular imam for the first generations of Muslims.

Salafism close to Saudi official institutions is most often “preservation” Salafism. There is no question of upsetting the European social and political order, even less so since jihadist radicalization has become a central issue for European public opinion (Coolsaet, 2016; Baker-Beall, 2014, 2018). While for a long time, religious and, more generally, imaginary religious views on this form of Salafism could officially encourage European followers to reject many social and cultural norms of the majority (shaking a woman’s hand, looking for a job that would not allow them to practice Islam in a rigid manner), recent years have seen a moderation on the part of many Saudi clerics who are now more than aware that European states have their eyes fixed on them. In addition to the change in political leadership at the head of Saudi Arabia since the emergence of Prince Muhammad Ibn Salman, international pressure on the official Saudi clerics, who are the leaders of global preservation Salafism, has led to a real crisis of religious identity due to the tension that is now more visible than ever between the imperative of orthodox preaching and the desire not to appear as accomplices of those Salafists who preach transformation through violence. Thus, the European followers who identify with this preservation version of Salafism most often keep away from life in majority society and develop a way of life oscillating between cultural rupture and economic isolation through entrepreneurship because, paradoxically, their refusal of “unbelief” pushes them to take economic control and to found their own society (local shops, pilgrimage agencies, Islamic bookshops) in order to escape the constraints of professional activities with non-Muslims. Consequently, their fundamentalist ethics often make them actors of social ascension through the desire to earn money and to rise socially in the name of a puritanical Islam, which allows them, on the model of the Protestant sects studied a long time ago by Weber, (2015), to see in their worldly success a sign of divine election.

Subversive Salafism, on the other hand, is structured around small groups that (with few exceptions) do not run places of worship, but are active in symbolic and targeted confrontation with the majority society. This is, for example, the case of Sharia4Belgium, an organization managed by Fouad Belkacem (using the kunya Abu Imran) and founded in 2010 (but since dissolved), whose members regularly demonstrate, today as members of other associations, to impose their religious views in the public space without getting involved in traditional political debates or forming a traditional party organization or structure. Subversive Salafism differs from transformative Salafism in that it does not advocate direct action. While this does not mean that there is no verbal and conceptual strategy for justifying violence, subversive Salafists are first and foremost the actors of a politico-religious entryism in whose name they make known who they are and that they disapprove of what the West is supposed to be doing to Islam and Muslims.

Transformation Salafism, finally, has become the source of burning debates in contemporary European societies. Transformative Salafism through violence echoing jihadist profiles is undoubtedly the religiosity that raises the most questions and fears. The scale of the phenomenon, between 10,000 and 20,000 people from the European continent became foreign fighters in the Arab world according to Byman, (2019), leads us to consider two important dynamics. On the one hand, contrary to what was observed until the beginning of the 2000s, when jihadists spoke of the need to purify morals and orthodoxy, there seems to be a growing disconnection between fundamentalism and violence. In other words, jihadists are increasingly violent activists and less puritanical believers, at least in terms of their social and religious practices. While they still cultivate mobilizing themes such as the Caliphate and Shari’a, sociologically speaking, there are more and more jihadists coming from Europe with no clear desire to be religiously fundamentalist or even to take a close interest in Islam. In this respect, there is a modern evolution of jihadism that leads us to consider the possible break between Salafism and jihadism in the long term if the same developments persist (Khosrokhavar, 2021). On the other hand, current terrorism is part of what could be called a viral paradigm, insofar as, with the exception of the attacks of 13 November 2015 in Paris and Brussels on 22 March 2016, a form of moral conditioning precedes the act. Armed combat here is a form of acculturation before being the fruit of military engagement. The transition to violence operates in a viral mode in that a relationship of hostility is introduced or reinforced in certain individuals who will find it declined in the context of a relationship of violence of which they themselves will often be the designers. There is indeed a significant amount of personal creativity here, since although the ideological contours are known (state of permanent war, designation of the enemy), the practical details of the terrorist act are left to the perpetrator. It is therefore not so much a question of a sponsored action as of the terrorist careers that are provoked. Hostility to others is deployed in a jihadist mode when it could have been transmitted in the form of symbolic, verbal, or physical (more classical) violence. Terrorist radicalization (Ranstorp, 2010; Sageman, 2016) here seems to espouse the jihadist agenda as put forward by the Islamic State, but is in fact determined by more complex factors. Any phenomenon of hostility (even non-religious hostility) thus finds expression in an imaginary that has taken shape in another part of the world. The Islamic State thus offers the conditions for the conversion of existing social or interpersonal tensions into sacred combat. In this, the opportunities of armed jihad are much more important since they are atomized and biographically fragmented. The trajectory of the Muslim actor sensitive to radical discourse can lead him to translate the frustrations and uneasiness that lead him to view his environment through a radical religious prism into a jihadist imaginary. The homology between personal psychological tensions and the desire to defend one’s co-religionists in other parts of the world explains much of terrorist radicalization. Becoming imbued with a transnational ideological struggle, local interactions may involve some Muslims becoming “jihadized.” The current generation of jihadists thus operates not so much from the jihadization of a tangible conflict in one part of the world as from the jihadization of social relations and tensions within societies that are often not even predominantly Muslim (Rabasa & Benard, 2014).

Conclusion: European as an opportunity for the rejuvenation of Salafism?

Is European Salafism settling down or will it remain an intransigent and radical religiosity evolving largely in globalized networks without a real agenda properly oriented towards North American and European societies? The first element is obvious: Salafism is not and probably never will be a centralized movement entirely dedicated to a specific objective. Salafism is a fundamentalist framework in which opposing and often contradictory agendas and methodologies come together. How, for example, within the framework of preservation Salafism, can one preach about a whole country when the horizon is the departure for the land of Islam? In transformative Salafism, the use of violent forms is leading more and more people to be drawn, as we are increasingly seeing in Europe, to extremism rather than orthodoxy and in so doing abandoning the reason for being part of Salafism, namely uncompromising belief and practice. Clearly, jihadists today are less and less Salafist and prefer violence to orthodoxy and orthopraxis (Roy, 2017). Subversive Salafism, for its part, has not had any notable political success, which may seem normal, since its function is symbolic entryism. In other words, this last form of Salafism has a more trivial than directly political dimension in that it is structured around radical and extremist grievances against Western society but without a long-term strategy or program of government. In this case, therefore, the slogan usually takes the place of a program, and no group representing this subversive Salafism has so far built a political party, nor decided to become a classical political actor on the model of certain Christian parties or extreme right-wing or extreme left-wing organizations.

For these different reasons, it would seem that Salafist-inspired movements will for a long time to come have to content themselves with the status of a counterculture structurally incapable of becoming a mass socio-religious reality. By allowing actors in search of religious absolutes and transcendental legitimization of their desire to break away and of certain difficult social conditions (racism, social relegation, generational crisis) to overturn certain stigmas (linked, for example, to ethnic origin) by establishing themselves as a caste at the top of a social pyramid that they have claimed to judge, Salafism thus becomes a language of revolt. It corresponds to a globalized offer of purity that can easily be turned against the West whose dominant values are generally built against the intrusion of the religious in the organizational principles of society, but what then is its future in this specific context?

Violent movements will certainly still be active and visible for many years to come, but no religious force has ever succeeded in transforming modern societies through violence. The Preservation Salafists, present in Europe and North America (Meleagrou-Hitchens, 2018) since the 1990s, are visible but only gather a few thousand people in each country, and for the time being, they stay away from political activism. Finally, subversive Salafists want to affect public order but without any real capacity for mobilization. It is therefore a vocal radicalism, but demographically and socially incapable of really influencing the course of Islam and Western societies that defines Salafism in this part of the world. For these reasons, if it settles permanently, there is, as things stand, strong reason to believe that it will be added to the long list of fundamentalisms that challenge the social order without being able or even wanting to change it or convert it to its views.