As firsthand accounts from Salafi Duʿāt (Callers) and Bowen’s (2014) study confirm, problems with Abu Muntasir first began when ‘by the early 1990s leading Salafis around the world were competing for JIMAS’s loyalty’; these Salafis all recognised that JIMAS was unlike any other Muslim youth movement or Islamic organisation at the time, as it ‘was not the UK offshoot of a larger foreign network’.[1] The attention JIMAS received from all these foreign groups, however, coincided with what has been described as ‘the period of turmoil’ in contemporary Salafi ‘daʿwah during the mid 90s onwards’, since it was at this time that the Gulf War of 1990 caused hybrid versions of Salafism (which had entered Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and 1980s)[2] to emerge after being latent for nearly a decade.[3] Featuring no understanding of how to implement the correct methodologies of ‘reform, correction, [and] daʿwah [in] returning the strength to Islam and its people’, these hybrids that falsely ascribed themselves to Salafiyyah began to proliferate rapidly.[4] In reality, they were pushing the innovated practices of 20th-century ideologues such as Sayyid Qutb, Mawdudi and Hasan al-Banna, whose corruption ‘continues to take hold in the minds of the people up until today’.[5]
[1] Bowen 2014:60.
[2] ‘Sahwa Islāmiyya: Literally “Islamic awakening”, movement that emerged from the 1970s in Saudi Arabia in opposition to the ruling family and to the constant compromise of the leading religious scholars. As a political and religious alternative to the state institutions, it sought to merge the political approach of the Muslim Brotherhood with the literalist doctrine’ (Bonnefoy 2011: xv). However, the Salafis being researched reject that their doctrine is ‘literalist’, instead they assert that it is taken upon the understanding of the early pious generations (al-Salaf al-Sālih).
[3] Salafi Publications 2003:2-4.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
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