Salafism and the local: Negotiation, accommodation and Re-localization of Ethiopian Salafism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates changes within Salafism – Ethiopia’s main Islamic reform current – over the last decade. We argue that these changes are driven by a new generation of Muslims increasingly embedded in the broader Ethiopian society and who find the more established Salafi ideas’ narrow emphasis on personal piety and on maintaining religious boundaries as insufficient in addressing questions related to their immediate realities. These young Muslims have subsequently started to question Salafi thought and practice, contested claims of religious knowledge, which in turn have forced senior Salafi leaders to re-negotiate their earlier isolationist and exclusivist positions. Our key question is whether these developments can be understood as the emergence of what has been labelled post-Salafism. We argue that such changes within Ethiopian Salafism – and Salafism more broadly – are not necessarily the results of detached ideological developments or caused by trans-local ideological flows. Instead, we believe that the local and situated discourses are far more important than previously assumed. We argue for the need to duly consider aspects beyond what is commonly imagined as the religious and to acknowledge how each locality is shaped by particular historical developments, contemporary cultural dynamics, changing demographics, socio-economic realities and political discourses.