“He’s Just a Man!”: Pashtun Salafists and the Representation of the Prophet

Abstract

Abstract Against the widespread understanding that Salafism in Pashtun religious circles owes its establishment to the close interaction with Arab representatives of that current since the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1990, a theologically quite radical form had indigenously emerged already in the late 1940s. This current, originating in the small town of Panjpīr in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, stands out by a rigid Salafī epistemology.