Salafism

Salafism is a modern Islamic movement which seeks to reform Sunni Islam through a return to scripture (the Quran and hadith) and the ways of the salaf al-salih (lit. "pious predecessors"; the name of the movement is taken from here), or the first three generations of Muslims (Muhammad and his sahaba or "companions", the tabi'un or "successors", and the tabu' al-tabi'een or "successors of the successors"). The movement seeks particularly to replace (through ijtihad) what it perceives to be the excessive interpretive apparatus of the traditional madhhabs (schools) of Islamic law with direct references to scripture. The Salafi movement also seeks, for similar reasons, to replace the Aristotelian theology of mainstream Sunnism as expressed by Asharism with the more scripturalist and literalist theology of the salaf (the same approach being also associated with the Hanbali school of law). Salafis generally consider classical Islamic discourse to be rife with hermeneutical artifacts which lack a clear basis (which, for them, amounts to bid'ah, or illegal "religious innovation") and, in this sense, the Salafis can be described as puritanical.^[1]

The Salafi movement is diverse in its expressions, as various groups contest what precisely scripture itself says on any number of topics without the aid of a specific interpretive apparatus. In this respect, the Salafi movement is comparable to Protestantism in Christianity.