Salafi Muslims are going into politics instead of trying to change the world through religious education or jihadi violence

Pseudonyms are used in this article to protect the anonymity of the research participants.

I met Sheikh Ahmed at a small mosque in central Morocco in October 2016. He told me: “We used to believe that Islam forbids all modern politics. We believed that politics was a western practice that divides Muslims and distracts them from worship.”

Ahmed is a proponent of Salafism, a form of Islamic “fundamentalism” and one of the most influential religious movements of the past 40 years. He continued: “But from 2011, we began to understand that Islam in fact requires us to enter politics.”