Hijrah of Our Time: Islamic Concept of Religious Emigration in Contemporary Salafism

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This study presents a comparison of the religious-legal concept of the hijrah in the approach of schools of Salafism, which are the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and the Muhammad al-Albani’s and his disciples’ teachings. The first, theoretical section of the submitted material, intends to provide a contextual ground on which the analytical chapter of this article is built up. The subsequent analytical section focuses on the breakdown of Salafist’s take on the hijrah through a qualitative content analysis of several texts that include, on one hand, the production of Muhammad al-Albani and his students, and on the other hand, the magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah, which were published on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The reason for choosing these particular authors and their conception of hijrah as the main research intention of the presented study is that on one hand the Islamic State represents the latest entity that conceptually grasped the topic and, above all, made it one of the pillars of its general ideology and on the other hand teachings of al-Albani are extremely influential in mainstream Salafism. The analysis showed that in general, both scrutinized Salafist schools are similar in the main principles, ie. both consider the hijrah to be an ongoing religious duty. However, they differ in details and also in the emphasis on violence, with the Islamic State emphasizing that hijrah and jihad are two stages of a single process, with the only possible destination for the hijrah being Islamic State territory.