Back to the Salaf: Why Islamic literalism appeals to young Muslims in America

In 2022, I was a middle school English teacher at a local Islamic school. Each morning, my eager sixth grade girls would ask me for an outfit spin. This often made me acutely aware of dresses that were slightly too form-fitting, pants that skimmed my ankles, and each strand of hair that threatened to peek out from my scarf. I worried that I was influencing my students to adopt improper hijab or immodest ways of dress.

God’s eye suddenly found me everywhere. On a visit to my neighborhood farmers’ market in October that same year, I was surprised to hear one of my students call out my name. As I greeted her and her mother, my stomach dropped: though I was fully covered, there was no way I would have worn the bright pink crochet dress I was in to work.

There was no place where a slightly questionable outfit was passable.

At the height of this tabarruj anxiety, I asked the imams at my masjid whether the tiny bells on my anklets, hidden under my jilbab, invalidated all of the prayers I had offered in this musallah. They were puzzled: where had I gotten this idea? My Islamic studies teacher, a woman in her forties, wore jeans and sneakers on her days off. Yet, this anxiety plagues the majority of my twenty-something friends who, like me, have gradually stopped wearing makeup, applying perfume, and wearing pants altogether.

The scrupulosity with which young Muslims now seek traditionalism often devolves into a fixation on outward aesthetic and rigidity instead of mercy, compassion, and generosity.

There appears to be a trending belief amongst young Muslims in the West today that piety is achieved only through the most stringent scriptural interpretation of the Qur’an and hadith, the recorded sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ). This literalist fixation can be attributed to a few contemporary phenomenons. First, the simultaneous “red-pill” and “tradwife” waves washing over Western society. Second, the rise in religious fundamentalism amongst young Muslims as a reaction to the War on Terror and ongoing public secularization. And, perhaps, the catalyst of the contemporary Salafi movement: the globalization of Saudi da’wah following the 1979 siege of Makkah.

Salafism is a literalist movement within Sunni Islam which seeks to emulate the first three generations of Muslim society, which are thought to be the only rightly guided interpretations of the faith. The movement inherently necessitates the rejection of Islam as a discursive tradition—the idea that Islam is not just a set of fixed beliefs and practices, but a constantly evolving, and sometimes localized, system of thought and action shaped by ongoing debates, interpretations, and interactions within Muslim communities.

One of the most controversial aspects of the Salafi movement is the inclination toward takfir, the process of accusing another Muslim of disbelief or apostasy. The Arabic word for disbelief, kufr, comes from a root meaning ‘to cover’ or to ‘bury.’ If a Muslim’s highest pursuit is for the Truth, the scrupulosity with which young Muslims now seek traditionalism often devolves into a fixation on outward aesthetic and rigidity instead of mercy, compassion, and generosity.

Red-pill religion

In November 2023, the now-suspended Twitter account (@swordsoftawheed) posted a graphic with the caption “wearing a jacket/coat over the khimar instead of under it, defeats the purpose of the khimar (to conceal the shape and size of the upper body).”

A “sheikh” responded to the post, further cementing the broader depravity of a mutabarrijah, saying “[the woman wearing khimar over her coat] is the one you want raising your children and preserving your honor.”

This post made its rounds on TikTok and Instagram, eventually pushing Ismail ibn Musa Menk, the Grand Mufti of Zimbabwe and popular Islamic speaker, to address it at the Light Upon Light conference in Birmingham, where he encouraged young Muslim women not to be overwhelmed by such strict interpretations of modesty.

“[Dress] for the sake of Allah, not for the sake of Abdullah.”

This advice, though lighthearted, reveals a point of convergence between “tradwife” and Salafi politics in the West.

The same year I began teaching, Andrew Tate, a former kickboxing champion turned self-proclaimed misogynist influencer, suddenly caught the attention of Muslims.

Several of my middle school boys referenced him frequently and lauded each other with the title of Top G. At the time, swarms of Muslim men were comfortable overlooking Tate’s social media content — which includes a video describing how he would respond if a girlfriend were to accuse him of cheating: “it’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her up by the neck. Shut up, b*tch … slap, slap, grab, choke.”

Since publicly announcing his conversion to Islam, Tate has continued to drink alcohol, gamble, and has been charged with sex-trafficking, rape, and violence against women. While there have been pockets of dissent, the choice many prominent imams and sheikhs have made not to publicly condemn Tate has allowed his misogynistic rhetoric to be seen as Islamically acceptable to many young people. Though Tate has lost some of his popularity in the years since, the impact of this misogynistic, red-pill rhetoric has taken root in Muslim communities, allowing men like Mohammed Hijab and Ali Dawah to grow in popularity on YouTube for their Salafist interpretations.

In this construction, men and women have opposing, complementary fitrahs, in which men naturally incline toward leadership, protectiveness, and reason and women toward compassion, submission, and nurturing.

One of the most notable offshoots of the red-pill movement is the idolization of the tradwife lifestyle. A tradwife (short for “traditional wife”) is a woman — often religiously conservative — who embraces ultratraditional gender roles by staying at home, submitting to her husband, and idealizing domestic life, often presenting this content through the glossy lens of hyperfemininity.

These tradwives espouse the benefits of their lifestyle to other women, gaining the approval of men who have long-awaited the re-domestication of the women they interact with. Gender essentialism is the meeting point of the two seas of red-pill rhetoric and Salafism.

In Islamic theology, all of creation is imbued with fitrah, a natural state of being which inclines toward complete submission to and worship of one God, “so be steadfast in faith in all uprightness ˹O Prophet˺—the natural Way of Allah which He has instilled in ˹all˺ people. Let there be no change in this creation of Allah.” (Al-Rum 3:30). This fitrah is present in all created things, from the grass to the mountains to the fish and birds, alongside human beings, of course.

Amongst Salafis, as well as red-pill and trad-wife proponents, another proposition is made: there is a gendered fitrah which has been corrupted by Western and non-Muslim socialization, perhaps drawing on the latter portion of the verse, “let there be no change.” In this construction, men and women have opposing, complementary fitrahs, in which men naturally incline toward leadership, protectiveness, and reason and women toward compassion, submission, and nurturing.

According to this belief, a Muslim woman raised without exposure to outside influence, as minor as a television show or as great as a traumatic experience in childhood, should grow up to be modest, submissive, and nurturing. She should excel in homemaking and naturally desire the authority of her husband. Any deviance from this archetype is an affront to the natural order of the world and God’s will. Such a gendered approach to understanding fitrah undermines the determining factors of personality or preference, and reject the examples seen even amongst the female companions of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) and early Muslim women.

Salafi softpower 

Around fajr on November 20th 1979, Makkah’s Masjid al-Haram, home to the Ka’ba, came under siege by hundreds of militants led by Juhayman al-Otaybi. A Saudi man opposed to the monarchy for its perceived betrayal of Islamic ideals in favor of Western secularism and cozy relationship with the United States, al-Otaybi and his men announced the supposed arrival of the mahdi, locked the doors of the masjid, and assumed defensive positions around al-Haram, trapping and killing worshippers in the process.

Prior to the siege, al-Otaybi and al-ikhwan were students of Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah Al Baz and other ulema under Al-Jama'a Al-Salafiya Al-Muhtasiba (“The Salafi Group that Commands Right and Forbids Wrong"). They eventually broke off from the group due to their extremism. Ibn Baz, who later served as the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia until his death in 1999, was the dean of the Islamic University of Medina, and held several deeply conservative and controversial viewpoints, at one point claiming that the Sun orbited the Earth, promoting takfir, and cited as the reason why Saudi women were prohibited from driving until recently.

His relationship with the Saudi royal family was often tense as they feared his opinions would paint a picture of primitiveness of the Kingdom. Still, with fighting strictly prohibited in the Haram, the monarchy needed a fatwa to take strong military action against the rebel militants, and ibn Baz was one of the few ulema with the legitimacy to offer it.

Ibn Baz agreed, but on the condition of allowing the ulema to rein in the moral depravity he, like his former students, perceived in the Kingdom. These demands included not only control over the social developments within Saudi Arabia, like the consequent banning of cinemas or imposed veiling, but also increased support for da’wah, or proselytizing, activities across the globe. After two weeks of conflict resulting in significant casualties, the Saudi National Guard and the Saudi Army regained control of the Haram.

Following the siege, the ulema of Saudi Arabia received large sums of money to build more mosques and influence over the curricula in schools and universities. This da’wah, born out of an apocalyptic moment, reshaped what Islam looked like around the world.

“By helping to define a Muslim identity globally,” Hesham Alghannam, a researcher at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, writes in “Influence Abroad: Saudi Arabia Replaces Salafism in its Soft Power Outreach,” “the kingdom was able to claim a leadership position within the Islamic world. Moreover, the interpretation of Islam promoted by Saudi Arabia, which advocates obedience to authority, facilitated a better maintenance of order and less of a potential for political violence.”

Islamic textbooks, translations of the Qur’an, and other teaching and literary materials were all exported as the authentic form of Islam. Many of the peculiarities of Al-Jama'a Al-Salafiya Al-Muhtasiba suddenly became mainstream after 1979. Despite Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s significant policy changes in the past decade to make the Kingdom more cosmopolitan, the global proliferation of Saudi soft power in the last half-century has made it so that Salafism has continued to prosper as orthodox Sunni Islam in many parts of the world.

If contemporary Saudi Salafism has been rising in popularity since the latter half of the 20th century, then why has it suddenly and sharply taken root in the Western world only recently?

The wounds of imperialism

Ramy Youssef’s latest series, #1 Happy Family USA, cleverly depicts the heavy anxiety felt by young Muslims in the West after 9/11. As the main character, middle-schooler Rumi, navigates his suddenly and increasingly xenophobic New Jersey neighborhood. He’s caught between his father’s desire to assimilate as a “good Muslim” and his mother’s insistence that their faith is nothing to be ashamed of.

In the early 2000s, during the height of the War on Terror, for American Muslims to assert themselves in the workplace — for example, that they would not compromise certain religious commitments, like shaking hands with the opposite gender or abstaining completely from happy-hour work gatherings — was virtually unthinkable. Disillusioned by the imperialist claims to civilize them, young Muslims craved an identity of their own, priming the landscape for Salafism.

Many Muslim Americans strove for assimilation through excellence, believing that visibility and achievement might offer safety or legitimacy. In raising their daughters, they resisted the stereotypes that might cast them as “backwards”— the Orientalist anxiety being that Islam’s primary failure was its treatment of women — encouraging them towards higher-education, leadership roles, and high-achieving careers.

In the fallout from the Obama era, it became clear, no amount of professional success might shield against suspicion, structural exclusion, or the ongoing decimation of the homeland. When a population responds to the trauma of imperialism, as is witnessed in the Muslim ummah as a whole, notions of authenticity and rigidity often become conflated.

As Muslim men are instructed, through violence and humiliation, by the colonizer about what it means to be a real man, some, in turn, utilize the same tactics in constructing the ideal Muslim woman.

A critical aspect of the imperialist wound is that one man’s masculinity can only be constructed at the expense of another. As Muslim men are instructed, through violence and humiliation, by the colonizer about what it means to be a real man, some, in turn, utilize the same tactics in constructing the ideal Muslim woman.

Simultaneously, the West, at-large, has experienced a reaction to fourth-wave feminism. This can be seen on a small scale: men who lose their jobs or experience professional setbacks often seek to regain control of their households. When the loss is greater, so is the reactionary violence. Abuse is not simply a private issue but a reflection of broader political and historical systems: a continuum of violence, from empire to household, often rooted in the same ideologies of domination and control.

For Muslim men who feel emasculated by imperial violence and Western suspicion, Salafism promises certainty, authority, and control. It redirects the frustrations of underemployment, loss of community, and subjugation into a sense of dignity and order. For women, however, the landscape has changed significantly following the feminist movements of the late 20th century; the tension between men yearning for submission and women who assert new forms of agency creates a combustible dynamic, which is seemingly being mediated by women abandoning their own autonomy through the adoption of gendered piety. Salafism sets out to resist assimilation, even as it reproduces many of the logics of domination it seeks to escape.

What the past can’t fix

Part of the inflexibility of the Salafi surge can be attributed to how young people receive religious advice in the digital age. Far from the community imam or sheikah who understands the circumstance, temperament, or potential of the individual they are imparting advice to, digital da’is can, by the nature of their platform, only give blanket, black-and-white advice to a depersonalized audience. Both anti-feminist and Salafi movements rely on this deference authority and minimization of nuance, making the same promise: all of your problems will disappear if you return to the days of the old.

Meanwhile, Salafism is rooted in the resistance to innovation in religion, and a desire to hold onto the past as the truest form of Islam, but the means through which many of these young Muslims are coming into their religion is untraditional. Despite the plurality of the Islamic legal tradition, it claims to carve out the singular right path to achieving God’s pleasure. Amongst both men and women, the simultaneous desire to connect with one’s true identity — an Islamic self that is distinct from the imposition of imperialist attitudes on faith, body, and mind, as well as the imposition of Salafism and social conservatism — creates a spiritual rigidity amongst many young Muslims that becomes hard to reconcile even personally with ideas of autonomy and equality.

Salafism sets out to resist assimilation, even as it reproduces many of the logics of domination it seeks to escape.

One of the core pillars of Islam is salah, prayer. In Sunni theology, prayer was revealed through the journey of the Prophet ﷺ from Makkah to Jerusalem to the heavens and back, Al-Isra w Al-Miraj. In heaven, God legislates 50 mandatory prayers for the Muslims; as the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ begins to descend with this revelation, he passes Prophet Musa who advises him that this will be too burdensome on humankind. The Prophet ﷺ returns to God, shyly, asks for the prayers to be reduced in half, and God amends the commandment to 25 prayers. Again, upon his descent Prophet Musa advises him that this will be too many for his nation. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ goes back and forth to the highest level of heaven until God reduces His commandment to only five prayers.

Even God, in His magnanimity and foresight, compromises with man. It is only man who is so rigid and unyielding, because his dominion is small and easily snatched away. One of the most notorious tyrants, Firawn, is mentioned in the Qur’an, despicably claiming in his ego and violence, “I am your Lord, the Most High.’’ When literalists demand unquestioning submission, they assert their authority to be even more absolute than God’s. This rigidity, rather than illuminating the truth, only obscures it.