Salafi jihadis do not merely think democracy is a bad way to run a country. They think it is idolatry, and they say so in the plainest possible terms. Daniel Lav has traced that claim back through 20th-century Islamism, through the 18th-century Wahhābī movement, to a Syrian polymath writing seven hundred years ago. He joins Tornike Metreveli to explain why the doctrine is meant literally, and why calling it fascism gets it wrong.
The guest and the episode
Dr Daniel Lav is a lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He took his BA at the University of Chicago and his MA and PhD at the Hebrew University’s Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. He works on Islamic theology, with a particular emphasis on the Salafi tradition of Sunni Islam from Ibn Taymiyya to the present. He is the author of Radical Islam and the Revival of Medieval Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Salafi Political Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2025), the book discussed in this episode.
In this episode Daniel Lav takes the book into conversation with Tornike Metreveli, and he opens by insisting on something listeners tend to soften: when radical Salafis call human legislation polytheism, they mean it literally. People kill and die on the strength of it. He calls the doctrine theonomy, from theos and nomos: applying God’s law is a sine qua non of faith, and whatever departs from it, above all democracy, is idolatry. Obedience is servitude, servitude is worship, so obeying a parliament is worshipping men. The genealogy runs deeper than Islam, between an ancient Near Eastern God imagined as a king, whose vocabulary is command and obedience, and a Greek theology after a rational account of divinity.
The pivot is Ibn Taymiyya, who split tawḥīd in two and made the primary form not the doctrine that God is one but exclusive worship of Him, tawḥīd al-ulūhiyya, monolatry. On that reading, the unbelievers of the Qurʾān were already monotheists, condemned for venerating intercessors, and the line between Muslim and unbeliever moves accordingly. Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb made that single doctrine the reason for his movement’s existence, and Lav presses the point that the Saudi state was a by-product of an anti-idolatry campaign rather than its cause. The twentieth-century turn came from outside Salafism, through Mawdūdī and Sayyid Qutb, whose question was whose authority one accepts, God’s or man’s.
Where it becomes concrete is apostasy. The ruling against democratic government is general; who counts is argued in detail, from Hamas’s Political Bureau down to a traffic policeman in Gaza. The quietist majority share the doctrine almost entirely and decline its conclusions. Lav closes by refusing the fascism analogy: Schmitt’s sovereign decisionism needs a human agency that decides, and for the Salafi jihadis the state decides nothing, existing only to implement a law it did not make.
“People would often say to me: they can’t mean that, that’s not literal, right? But it is. And how do we know? Because in the name of these principles people kill and put their own lives at risk.”
Listen
Listen to the episode in your own app.
The transcript has been edited for readability. Filler, false starts and repetitions have been removed. Wording is otherwise the speakers’ own. The episode was released on 28 February 2026. Running time around 34 minutes.
The puzzle: democracy as idolatry
Tornike Metreveli: Hello and welcome to Religion in Praxis. Today our guest is Dr Daniel Lav, a lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After his BA studies at the University of Chicago, he completed an MA and a PhD at the Department of Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University. His area of research is Islamic theology, with a particular emphasis on the Salafi tradition of Sunni Islam, from Ibn Taymiyya to present-day Salafi movements. To date, his principal contributions to the literature are two books on the intellectual history of Salafism, premodern and modern: Radical Islam and the Revival of Medieval Theology, published by Cambridge University Press, and Salafi Political Theology, also published by Cambridge University Press, the book that we will discuss today. Daniel, welcome to Religion in Praxis.
Daniel Lav: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure and an honour.
Tornike Metreveli: Very good, very good. And today we start from a difficult but important puzzle. Why do some radical Salafi movements treat democracy not as politically wrong, but as a form of idolatry, something to be eradicated? What is your core claim?
Daniel Lav: Absolutely. Well, this is the question from which I started at the beginning of my doctoral research, which provided the basis for, and is the origin of, this current book. And when I first began this project, sometimes I would tell people I’m looking into why Salafis, or radical Salafis, Salafi jihadis as they’re known, do consider democracy and human legislation to be a form of polytheism and idolatry that must be combated.
And people would often say to me, or not often, some people would say to me: they can’t mean that, you know, that’s not literal, right? But it is. And how do we know? Because in the name of these principles, and I’ll address actual motivation a little bit later, in the name of these principles people kill and put their own lives at risk. One of the first insights that I had, long ago, was that this is not a literary trope or a general theme. It’s a real theological doctrine, or a theo-political doctrine, that they take very seriously.
And likewise, one can also see this from the construction of the doctrine. I mean, there are hundreds and thousands of works, books, essays, videos and sermons and so forth that exposit these things. So it’s something that they take very seriously.
Now, that is just a preface. I have not yet addressed why, and that is going to be our topic for today.
Where the doctrine comes from
Daniel Lav: So first I would like to say that the ultimate origin of the relevant motifs lies beyond Islam, in the Abrahamic faiths. That is where we find the ultimate origin of this doctrine, which I call theonomy, from theos and nomos, God and law: the idea that application of God’s law is an essential requirement, a sine qua non of faith, and likewise the characterisation of everything that strays from that ideal, that is human legislation, or in the 20th and 21st centuries in particular democracy, as polytheism.
So what are these motifs? The basic principle underlying modern radical Salafi theonomy is the idea that obedience to humans is a form of polytheism, in contrast with obedience to Allah, which is monotheism. And I’ll stick with that term “monotheism” for now. I’ll complicate it a little bit in a few minutes.
And why is that? Because it is servitude to humans instead of servitude to Allah, or alongside servitude to Allah, which they understand as the same thing. And if we take things one step further, then obedience and servitude are worship. So obedience to a modern government that is based on man-made law would be worship of humans instead of exclusive worship of Allah. And this doctrine is the primary casus belli for groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in their war against the ruling governments of the Muslim world. So it’s not a small issue. It’s a very important issue. And that is the intellectual history that I attempt to address in the book.
Tornike Metreveli: It’s an interesting, striking move, in a way, that obedience to law is treated as a kind of worship. So human legislation becomes a kind of devotion to something other than God. Could you help us unpack this, to see where it comes from, and why it attaches so strongly to modern parliaments and constitutions? Just give our listeners a little tour of this intellectual origin, if you will.
Daniel Lav: Absolutely. So I’ll distinguish between the ultimate origins and the Islamic intellectual history, as I see it. For the ultimate origins, one has to go back to these archetypes of Abrahamic faith. I think we’re all basically aware that there are two primary currents that have fed into the formulation of the Islamic faith as it was elaborated in the Middle Ages in medieval theology.
For one, we have to go back to the ancient Near East and the Bible, to ancient Israelite religion, which is the origin of many of these themes. And what is important there is the biblical theology, if one can call it that, of God as king. That is, ancient Israelite faith as a projection of themes and topics associated with kingship onto the transcendent realm. And so these basic notions of command, obedience and servitude are taken from a basileomorphic understanding of divinity, that is, the projection of God as a king who is supreme over all mundane kings, or even in opposition to mundane kings. If we think about the humiliation of Pharaoh in the Exodus from Egypt, that is a paradigmatic example, which is also found in the Qurʾān.
And on the other hand, we have various Greek-influenced conceptions of monotheism, which are in a different world entirely. Our word theology apparently comes from Plato’s Republic, and in that context it means doing away with incorrect or primitive conceptions of the gods, as one finds in Homer or in Hesiod, in order to arrive at a correct rational understanding of divinity, of the God or of the gods.
So these are the two different streams that really, in a nutshell, interact in medieval Islamic theology in various ways. And for our purposes, Salafi theology is unique in that it places all of the emphasis on divine kingship, that is, on the themes of exclusive obedience and worship, and explicitly contrasts them with various philosophical notions that were entirely integrated into the medieval Islamic discussions, but that have more to do with correct conceptualisation of God, or a conceptual monotheism.
So on the one hand we have conceptual monotheism, and on the other hand we have this principle that I refer to as monolatry. That is, that the central aspect of faith is exclusive worship of one God, rather than a correct kind of propositional attitude of monotheism regarding the existence of one God and the non-existence of others, and that sort of thing.
So that is the ultimate origin of these themes. And from here there remains a lot to discuss in terms of Islamic intellectual history, and how it is that Salafism came to emphasise certain aspects rather than others, and then in the modern period to interpret these in a truly direct theo-political sense.
Ibn Taymiyya and the two kinds of tawḥīd
Tornike Metreveli: So what changed when Islam is defined primarily by exclusive worship rather than conceptual monotheism? What does this do to boundary-making, if you will, and to the identification of idolatry? And in the same move, if you can, let us digest this revival, 18th-century revivalism: what is simplified, what is intensified, and what makes this doctrine somehow portable and actionable in the form of a movement? Just give us an idea of the turning points, the period, the time frame, what caused it and in which direction we went.
Daniel Lav: Excellent. So first of all, I should point out that I freely use the term premodern Salafism, which is not universally accepted in the research. That is one of the main things that I’ve tried to do in the book, to specify the relation between these currents of premodern Islam and what today we call Salafism. To refer to premodern Salafism is something of an anachronism, as others have pointed out. But I think that the continuities are so clear, and that will come to light when I explain a little bit more.
So, to understand Salafi theology and Salafi thought in general: what I refer to as premodern Salafism was a minority current within Sunni Islam, pretty much from the time that we are aware of Sunni Islam, or that we can trace its emergence, to the present day. That is, it was less widespread than, let’s say, the Ashʿarī school of theology or the Māturīdī school of theology and the Sufi orders, the things that pretty much defined what Sunni orthodoxy was for most people in the premodern period.
And the most important figure that we have to refer to here is a Syrian scholar and polymath of the 13th and 14th centuries by the name of Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Taymiyya, or just Ibn Taymiyya, who really crystallised Salafi theology as we know it today. So when we want explanations of why the idea of exclusivity of worship, or monolatry, is so central to Salafi theology and so forth, most of the answers go back to this one thinker, Ibn Taymiyya, and the manner in which he crystallised certain emphases that were certainly present before him in the Islamic tradition, but in very original ways, which a Salafi shouldn’t do, right? In principle they’re opposed to all non-canonical terminology and so forth. But Ibn Taymiyya is something of an exception in this regard.
And the key term here is tawḥīd in Arabic, which is normally translated as monotheism. But that is incorrect for Ibn Taymiyya, because he explicitly defined two basic kinds of tawḥīd, or two forms of tawḥīd, one of which could reasonably be called monotheism, or conceptual monotheism, that is, doctrine regarding the existence of God and His attributes. He affirmed the ontological reality of Allah’s attributes, for example, in contrast with most streams of premodern theology, and so on and so forth.
But for Ibn Taymiyya all of that is secondary, because the primary form of tawḥīd, in his opinion, was what he referred to as tawḥīd al-ulūhiyya, which simply means exclusivity of worship. Almost literally, that is monotheism. [Editor’s note: Lav appears to misspeak here. The distinction he has just drawn makes tawḥīd al-ulūhiyya monolatry rather than monotheism.] And it was his contention that all of the unbelievers described in the Qurʾān were basically monotheists. That is, there are certain verses that recur in his writings which point out that the unbelievers acknowledged that Allah exists, and that He is the High God, and that He created the cosmos and so on and so forth. And in his opinion, the reason that the unbelievers are castigated in the Qurʾān as unbelievers, and as polytheists who must be fought, was because they devoted worship to other entities as intermediaries or intercessors with Allah.
That is, the Qurʾān is not so much a message that comes and announces there is one God who created all of the cosmos and so on and so forth, but rather it is a kind of polemic against a cult of saints that monotheists, or self-proclaimed monotheists, engaged in. And so that is a very radical, revolutionary recentring of what Islam is, what the definition of Islam is, and, as you intimated, what the dividing line then is between Muslims and unbelievers. So that is the core doctrine, it is the most important doctrine, that sets the stage for everything in the book, including the modern developments.
The Wahhābī movement
Daniel Lav: Now, when one is dealing with actual history, or intellectual history, it is of course not the case that texts simply reproduce themselves, or that ideas reproduce themselves independently of the human agents who decide to adopt them and act on them. And in that sense, the second important turning point is in the mid-18th century in Arabia, with the birth of the Wahhābī movement, as we normally call it. That’s not what it called itself at first, but it is called such for the name of its founder, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb.
And the question of the relation between Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and the Wahhābī movement on the one hand, and Ibn Taymiyya on the other, is not a new one. Since the late 19th century, basically since the birth of Islamic studies as an academic discipline, this is one of the topics that has been discussed. But oddly enough, it has only rarely been formulated correctly, and there was still a lack of clarity, for some reason, in this arena. And starting in the 1970s even, a lot of scholars began to doubt whether this was really an important influence, or how important an influence it was, vis-à-vis other factors.
Whereas in my reading, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb is very simply a dyed-in-the-wool Taymiyyan. That is, he adopted these views that were normally considered marginal, if not heterodox, in premodern Islam. And he made of tawḥīd al-ulūhiyya, of the doctrine of monolatry, the central doctrine and the raison d’être of his movement, which began as an anti-idolatry campaign. That is, he viewed his contemporaries as polytheists and idolaters specifically because of this precise doctrine of tawḥīd al-ulūhiyya of Ibn Taymiyya.
And he set out in a real-world war against the so-called polytheism, the cult of saints that was widespread at the time in the Arabian Peninsula and throughout the Muslim world, mostly tomb-centred devotion of various kinds. And he set out to eradicate it. And the country that we know as Saudi Arabia was originally just a by-product of this anti-idolatry campaign.
Tornike Metreveli: I wonder if you…
Daniel Lav: So those are the bases.
Tornike Metreveli: I’m sorry, yes. No, please, please.
Daniel Lav: Yeah. So those are the bases. And then on top of that, one has to understand a bit more about the equation of obedience to law as worship, and then a further transformation in the 20th century where that was displaced from jurisprudential discourse to more directly political discourse. But if you have a follow-up question, or…
Tornike Metreveli: I still wanted to look into chapter two, about the 18th-century revivalism question. Is this, if it needs to be in quotation marks, a theological consequence, or some kind of political strategy? In other words, does the coercion follow from the doctrine, or do state formation dynamics then dress themselves doctrinally?
Daniel Lav: In my opinion, when it comes to the Wahhābī movement, the state formation is entirely secondary to the theological principles and to the real war against the cult of saints. Now, why do we call it Saudi Arabia? Because Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb reached a famous concord, or agreement, with someone who was at the time a petty emir of just one of the many desert oases in central Arabia, Muḥammad ibn Saʿūd. And the Saʿūd name has continued since then, the ruling family that Saudi Arabia has. There have been three different Saudi states since then, but whenever they’ve been in control, they’ve been descendants of that same family, just as the muftis of Saudi Arabia until the 20th century were always descendants of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb.
So we can trace that he wasn’t his original ally. He had an ally from a different desert oasis. That is, the revolutionary theological and devotional aspects of Wahhābism much precede state formation. And in fact Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb didn’t even survive to see the conquest of Mecca and Medina by the Wahhābī movement. That was after he passed away. So in this case it’s very clear, and I would hold up the Wahhābī movement as a paradigmatic example of how a certain conception of transcendence, a certain conception of how the mundane world must be ordered in relation to the divine world, really shapes real-world human history.
Tornike Metreveli: I wonder what textual move turns this from illegitimate into must be fought. What sort of example can you give, if you can, if any?
Daniel Lav: Well, let’s address this through the Muslim profession of faith, right: lā ilāha illā Allāh, Muḥammad rasūl Allāh. That is normally translated as there is no god but Allah, and Muḥammad is the prophet, or messenger, of Allah. But Ibn Taymiyya, in his monolatry doctrine, insisted that the literal meaning of ilāh is an object of worship. And therefore the profession of faith is that there is no object worthy of worship. It’s a commitment: one says there is no object worthy of worship apart from Allah. It’s not a statement of conceptual monotheism, it’s a statement of commitment to monolatry.
And from there things flow fairly naturally. For example, Ibn Taymiyya brings up a well-known hadith, a tradition from the Prophet Muḥammad, where he states: “I was commanded to fight people until they testify lā ilāha illā Allāh,” and so on and so forth. So Ibn Taymiyya understands it not just as the verbal profession, but as the commitment to monolatry. That is the criterion that grants a Muslim the status of immunity in life and property that comes with conversion to Islam. And conversely, everybody else does not have that, and ought to be fought until there is no more polytheism.
From jurisprudence to politics: Mawdūdī and Qutb
Tornike Metreveli: How is apostasy operationalised here? What counts as an apostate – a ruler, a parliamentarian, a soldier, a voter? How is that justified?
Daniel Lav: So now we’re going to the 20th century. Perhaps I should address the shift in application that I alluded to before, because so far what I’ve described is a pure Salafi genealogy of the theonomy doctrine, from Ibn Taymiyya through the Wahhābīs. But there were two important figures in the 20th century, two authors who are not generally affiliated with the Salafi tradition, who had a tremendous impact in this regard. I am referring to the Indo-Pakistani Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī and the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb.
Now, I say that these two are generally not affiliated with Salafism because Qutb, for example, was one of the leading members and ideologues of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and Mawdūdī was the founder of an organisation called Jamaʿat-i Islami, which is still active today in Pakistan and other areas of South Asia. And these are generally considered modern forms of Islamism. And so, even in the study of Salafism, while many have already written on this influence, it is generally viewed as a kind of extraneous influence. That is, modern radical Salafism is the confluence of two different streams: on the one hand Mawdūdī and Qutb, and on the other hand the Salafi-Wahhābī tradition.
Now, what was important about Mawdūdī and Qutb? What was important about them was the fact that they centred theonomy. They centred the question of obedience, and obedience to law, as the true heart of Islam. That is, the basic question, in anything, according to Mawdūdī, is: whose authority does one accept, God’s or humans’? And so this is a more directly theo-political doctrine than what I have been describing to date. And their importance is that in the course of the 1970s and 1980s their ideas, and especially their emphasis on the necessity of obedience to the law of God and the prohibition of obedience to the law of others, came to be reinterpreted in more orthodox and staid Salafi terms. That is, it was integrated into the Taymiyyan belief system of modern radical Salafism.
Now, my approach to Mawdūdī and Qutb is a little bit different. What I see in their writings themselves are very strong structural parallels to the Salafi tradition of monolatry that I’ve been discussing, and also jurisprudential corollaries, which it is very clear to me influenced Mawdūdī, probably through his familiarity with the South Asian Salafi movement known as the Ahl-i Ḥadīth.
So this jurisprudential tradition is one that already translates monolatry into theonomy. It says that law schools that allow for too wide a berth for human judicial reasoning and/or (these usually went together) place too much emphasis on adherence to the precedents of the law school, of which there are four orthodox ones in Sunni Islam, that all of that is tantamount to human legislation and obedience to human law, in contrast with obedience to Allah’s law. Because the Salafi judicial approach is one that we would not be too far off if we described it as sola scriptura. That is, whatever one can derive directly from the Qurʾān and from the hadith, the traditions from the Prophet Muḥammad, that is divine law. And many things that the other schools accept as being divine law, they say, no, that’s actually human law.
This is much in the same way that the principle of exclusivity of worship is not far from what most Muslims would say, or perhaps universally, that is, one must worship only God. But the doctrinal definition of these things makes it so that what many other Muslims consider to be consistent with exclusive worship of Allah is categorised by the Salafis as idol worship, as polytheism. And likewise, what many other Muslims consider to be obedience to God’s law, the Salafis tended to characterise as obedience to human law, and that as a form of worship of others apart from Allah.
So Mawdūdī in particular, I feel that he was influenced by these precedents himself, certainly the jurisprudential precedent. But once he was even asked by one of his contemporaries whether there was any precedent at all for his interpretation of the Islamic profession of faith, lā ilāha illā Allāh. And his answer was that there is only Ibn Taymiyya, who came close. But when he came close, he turned it back. So it was not this directly theo-political interpretation, but he did himself apparently recognise a commonality between himself and the Taymiyyan doctrine of monolatry.
Apostasy: how far does it reach
Daniel Lav: So now that I have briefly addressed those, we can come back to your question. Could you restate it, actually?
Tornike Metreveli: Yeah. Well, my question was about apostasy and how it’s operationalised, and just if you give us a general view on that.
Daniel Lav: Right. So once these things are linked directly to the political situation, that is the theonomic shift: Mawdūdī took things and said, well, this government then is not legitimate, and it would be apostate. And the modern Salafis have a more precise definition of that, because, due to various elements of Salafi faith, they have a more precise definition of these things, and an actual ruling of apostasy.
Now, first and foremost, this is a general ruling against the forms of government that employ democracy or any democratic means, elections, a legislative branch of government and so on and so forth. But that’s still a general theme. Now, the question of who actually is an apostate, which individuals are apostates, is delineated differently by different radical Salafis.
I remember response, for example, from approximately 15 years ago, let’s say from the period after Hamas ran in Palestinian elections. Then the Salafi jihadis began to say, “well, Hamas is apostate then”. But the question is how far does that trickle down into different layers. That is, members of the Political Bureau, most likely are apostates, but what about an individual fighter in the al-Qassām Brigades, the so-called military wing, and so forth? And there are different answers to that. And then once you get to traffic cops, then it is probable that traffic police in Gaza are not apostates just because they served under Hamas. So those are discussions about how far the apostasy goes, to which circles. It’s a matter of debate.
And there are some, for example Sayyid Imām al-Sharīf, who was a very important member of the first generation of Salafi jihadis, or Salafi jihadi scholars, who feels that voting is apostasy per se. And others would agree with that principle, but they might hem it in a little bit more. But that is what he says. And he says, you know, you can’t be deceived by the fact that millions and millions, or tens of millions, of people have abandoned Islam. I mean, they have. That’s what he says.
And that also touches on what’s different between the radical Salafis and… I mean, the radical Salafis are not the numerical majority of Salafis living today. There are no reliable statistics on this, but that’s fairly obvious. Most Salafis belong to a current that is generally referred to as scholastic Salafism, or quietist Salafism, or purist Salafism. And what is really fascinating is that they are not so doctrinally different from the radical Salafis when it comes to these issues of government and legislation and so on and so forth. The major difference is not in the doctrine itself, but in the conclusions one draws from it.
So the more conservative Salafis have many mechanisms by which they avoid the need to draw conclusions that so-and-so is an apostate, or that armed revolt is mandated. And those get very technical. One of these mechanisms relates to the relation between acts and faith. That is, they will hold that the very act of ruling by a law other than what Allah revealed is not in itself apostasy, unless one makes an explicit statement that that law is preferable to Allah’s law, for example. There’s also an issue of exculpatory ignorance, which is taken from classical Islamic jurisprudence, where they can argue that “well, people just don’t understand the issue well enough, and if they understood it better then they wouldn’t do this”. So that’s the principle of al-ʿudhr bi-l-jahl, exculpatory ignorance. And there are others as well.
I mean, it’s best to think of them simply as a conservative ethos that is not interested in drawing the radical conclusions that the radicals do. And then, as I stated, within the Salafi jihadis themselves, among the radical Salafis themselves, there are also gradations as to how far this claim of apostasy goes.
Not fascism: the state as executor
Tornike Metreveli: You end with the typological claim that this is not well described through analogies like 20th-century fascism, because the Salafi jihadi logic makes the state secondary to an immutable law rather than elevating sovereign decisions. So to close, what do you want the listeners, especially the students, who are our main audience, to take away as the single most important correction to how these debates are usually framed? And what would you say is the most common misunderstanding that your book helps us avoid?
Daniel Lav: I’d like to start maybe from the second part of your question, the most common misunderstanding. Since al-Qaeda came into the public consciousness in the West, you know, in force only after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, so we’re talking about the past 25 years or so, these movements and their ideas have often been seen either as something either exotic, or as something where the ideas are not really that important, and we need to pay more attention to political context and geopolitics and so forth. And all that does have to be taken into account, you know, America as the foremost power in the world, and how they view America, and why, and so forth.
But I believe that what I have shown is that there’s nothing especially mysterious about Salafi jihadis, and there’s also nothing especially exotic. I mean, one has to understand, if one’s background is in Christianity or Judaism or something else, then certainly one has a lot of learning to do to be able to properly analyse these issues. But once properly analysed, what we see is really something that is not very different from issues that have been discussed, especially in the 20th century, in the field of study generally labelled political theology.
That is, if we return to the contrast that you noted that I make in the conclusion: Carl Schmitt, for example, the Weimar jurist who was affiliated with the Nazis later… his delineation of sovereign decisionism, that is an element, a necessary element, of fascism, is really this insistence that there be a human agency that makes the decisions, and from this the cult of the leader. Whereas, as you mentioned, for the Salafi jihadis everything is about Allah’s law. So the state is not primary, not a mechanism for sovereign decisionism. It is simply entirely executive and administrative in their conception, and its only reason for existence is to implement Allah’s law, which sometimes requires force, because not everybody obeys Allah’s law voluntarily.
So that’s a very good example of how radical Salafism is a political theology that needs to be understood, but once understood, we can really map out its place in 21st-century ideologies, or 21st-century political theology. And that is what I have hoped to bring, in the widest sense, to my readership: how one can take radical Salafism seriously and understand it in those kinds of terms.
Tornike Metreveli: Thank you so much, our wonderful guest today, Daniel Lav. And to our listeners, stay curious, keep asking questions, and keep tuning in to our podcast. We’ll see you next time on Religion in Praxis. Thank you very much!
Daniel Lav: Thank you!
Follow the show
Religion in Praxis is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and every other major podcast app. Click here to find it in yours.
To propose a guest or an episode, write to tornike.metreveli@eu.lu.se. If you spot an error in the transcript, write to shota.hintsagty@eu.lu.se.
If you enjoyed the show, don’t forget to share it around!
