Salafi Political Theology

Offers a novel interpretation of radical salafism, considering both its premodern and modern precedents and influences.

Daniel Lav (Author)

9781108495585, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 October 2025

372 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.6 cm, 0.67 kg

'Daniel Lav's Salafi Political Theology is by far the most authoritative work on the important religious movement labelled Salafi and its roots in premodern Islamic theology and intellectual history. This book reveals the connections between towering figures such as Ibn Taymiyya, Wahhabi scholars and the moderns who claim to be their descendants. Lav expertly unfolds their arguments, and in so doing traces their conceptual genealogies, both real and invented. No existing work does this in terms of textual rigor and analytical sophistication. This will be a work of reference for decades to come.' Bernard Haykel, Princeton University

Salafism is a theological movement whose radical wing is today affiliated with al-Qaʿida and the Islamic State, but which draws on precedents stretching back to the medieval theology of Ibn Taymiyya. This innovative study focuses on the concept of theonomy in salafi thought: the tenet that rule by God's law is an essential component of faith, and the corresponding notion that other forms of rule based on human legislation are inherently polytheistic and thereby illegitimate. It is this tenet which furnishes radical militants with their principal casus belli against ruling regimes in the Muslim world. In this book, Daniel Lav details the intellectual grounding for modern salafi theonomy in Ibn Taymiyya's doctrine of tawhid and the writings of the early Wahhabi movement, in addition to the twentieth-century thought of Abu al-Aʿla Mawdudi and Sayyid Quṭb, while drawing on insights from comparative political theology to analyze this key school of thought.

Introduction
1. Monolatry in Ibn Taymiyya's theological system
2. Monolatry in eighteenth-century revivalism
3. Theonomy in premodern Salafī jurisprudence
4. Mawdūdī and Quṭb: the theonomic shift
5. Salafī Jihādī theonomy.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]