The Rise of Political Salafism in Bangladesh and Its Challenge to Traditional Sunni Authority

Bangladesh has a distinctive presence in global perceptions of the Muslim world. Its religious character has been shaped not by militant orthodoxy but by a multi-layered, syncretic Sunni culture that is bound up in centuries of Ḥanafī jurisprudence, Sufi devoutness and vernacular Islamic expression, with approximately 150 million Muslims making it the third-largest Muslim-majority nation in the world. For centuries, the village maktab, the khānqāh (Sufi lodge) and the mazār (shrine) determined the course of religious life. Despite this, a modification has taken place.

Over the past three decades, a unique strand of Political Salafism has emerged in Bangladesh, both in mosques, madrasas, academic institutes, and increasingly through social media. Its presence is not yet hegemonic, but it is impossible to ignore. It has challenged — sometimes subtly, sometimes confrontationally — the very basis of the constitution, recognition and reproduction of religious authority in Muslim society in Bangladesh. This article argues that the development of Political Salafism in Bangladesh (from a sociological and epistemological perspective, from a Sunni perspective and in terms of norms) is a fundamental conflict over the legitimacy of inherited religious institutions and the question of what Islam should be when it is mobilized in the public square. Understanding this contest requires both intellectual honesty about the critiques Salafism raises and a firm appreciation for the classical Sunni tradition it seeks to displace.

Historical Background: The Texture of Bengali Sunni Islam

The tradition that Political Salafism is contesting must first be understood. Islam came to Bengal in several streams, most importantly from the awliyāʾ (Sufi saints) whose dargāhs continue to serve as vibrant institutions across the delta region today, and the Turkic-Afghan conquerors from the North-West. Some scholars, such as Muhammad Qasim Zaman, have demonstrated the ways in which the ʿulamāʾ in the subcontinent gained their status not just through state sponsorship, but by being part of local communities and earning trust and respect through their education, opining on legal matters fatāwā (Legal opinions) and social engagement.¹ This entrenchment was particularly acute in Bengal, which was geographically distant from the principal Islamic political hubs and thus required a more local adaptive mode of Islamic religious organization.

The Ḥanafī madhhab (legal school) was adopted as the almost universal basis for juridical life, passed on through the dars-i niẓāmī (the classical madrasa curriculum of South Asia) established in the Subcontinent, and which was adopted by hundreds of qawmī and ʿāliyā madrasas worldwide. As Ebrahim Moosa has pointed out in his book, What is a Madrasa? This was not a strictly formal act of imparting established facts, but a technology for creating a specific type of scholarly identity, one focused on textual manipulation under the auspices of the inherited legal tradition.² This juristic culture was complemented by the Sufi orders, particularly the Qādiriyya, Chishtiyya, and Naqshbandiyya, which provide an affective and devotional structure for popular Islam. The annual ʿurs (annual death commemoration of a saint) held at the graves of saints such as Shāh Jalal of Sylhet or Khan Jahan Ali of Bagerhat were not seen as a non-conformist strain in Islam, but as real Islam, deeply connected with local identity. It is by no means an idealized tradition. Within Bengali Sunni Islam, there were also internal strains, such as encounters between reformist factions, including the nineteenth-century Farāʾiḍī movement of Ḥājī Sharīʿatullāh, and those who believed in traditional practice.³ But these were, by and large, intra-tradition arguments — disagreements about the proper expression of Islamic normativity conducted within a shared framework of Sunni legal culture and respect for qualified scholarly authority.

Understanding Political Salafism: A Taxonomy

Political Salafism must be clarified first before understanding its forms in Bangladesh. In essence, Salafism is a method of Islamic epistemology that emphasises the practice of the salaf al-ṣāliḥ (the pious predecessors), the first three generations of Muslims, as the norm for Islamic life. Quintan Wiktorowicz has pointed out that Salafism is really a creed held by a range of actors that differ mostly on the issue of political engagement (manhaj).⁴ Wiktorowicz’s taxonomy identifies three general orientations. The madkhalī (quietist) tendency calls for submission to rulers, political silence, and a strict emphasis on doctrinal purity and personal practice. Political Salafism embraces the Islamic theological structure, but holds that involvement in political institutions, through electoral politics or civil activism, or reforming institutions, is a valid and appropriate arena for Islamic activity. Jihadi Salafism, the main proponents of which include Abū Muḥammad al-Maqdisī, has carried this logic further and concluded that armed action against “apostate states” is an Islamic duty. It is the middle category, Political Salafism, that is of concern here. Roel Meijer’s edited volume Global Salafism provides a more complex picture of how this tendency has taken shape across the world,⁵ informed by the intellectual heritage of scholars such as Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī, the man who pioneered rigorous ḥadīth criticism in modern Islam,⁶ Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ al-ʿUthaymīn and, crucially for the political trajectory, thinkers shaped by the reading of  ḥākimiyya (divine sovereignty) and the institutionalization of this reading through the global network of the Muslim Brotherhood.⁷ The difference between quietism, jihadism, and Political Salafism lies in their aim to transform public institutions, albeit within formal political limits. 

The Bangladeshi Context: Emergence and Conduits of Influence

Political Salafism did not arrive in Bangladesh through a single dramatic rupture. Its emergence was gradual, textured, and shaped by several intersecting forces. The first conduit was Gulf migration. Since the 1980s, millions of Bangladeshi workers began flowing to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, and Qatar, with the volume increasing further through the 1990s. Many came home with remittances, but also with a Salafist Islam, a doctrinal Islam in its Saudi form, which was formally promoted by the Saudi state via the networks of mosques, religious literature and formally trained imams. The sociologist Katy Gardner and others have documented how returning migrants from Sylhet in particular brought back changed religious sensibilities that often placed them in quiet tension with shrine culture and mazār veneration.⁸ This was not always a conscious conversion of ideology; it was often simply the Islam they had learned and internalised abroad.

The second conduit was institutional and financial. Saudi and Gulf-linked charitable groups, some of which were officially affiliated with the Muslim World League, financed the building of mosques, provided Arabic language religious materials (often in simplified Salafi interpretations) and sponsored students going abroad to study at the Islamic University of Medina.⁹ These graduates returned with qualifications, confidence, and a methodical desire to reach decisions based on the Qur’ān and ḥadīth, which sometimes put them at odds with the “blind following” (taqlīd) they saw in the traditional Ḥanafī- Sūfī  establishment. The funding of madrasas and mosques by foreigners is a subject that has been widely debated and discussed and is fraught with political overtones, but nonetheless is hard to argue against as having an impact on the religious landscape in Bangladesh. The third conduit is the most recent and potentially the most transformative: digital. Social media has created a new “religious marketplace” and a space where young Bangladeshis can encounter scholars, lecturers and polemical materials from the Salafi intellectual world of the entire world without anyone’s mediation. Figures such as Zakir Naik, who through his Islam Q&A website has reached millions, model a version of Islamic authority unrelated to lineaged scholarly transmission. It is useful to note here that Talal Asad’s influential concept of Islam as a “discursive tradition” is based on a model of argumentation within authoritative texts and practices among Muslims.¹⁰ The thrust of Political Salafism is to question the very premise of this argument: Whose voice is heard, from whose text, from what institution?

The Challenge to Traditional Sunni Authority

Political Salafism challenges Bengali Sunni institutions across several dimensions, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that some of these challenges carry genuine weight. The Salafi position against taqlīd (Blind following of a madhhab), that is following one of the four legal schools, has a weak and a strong version at the juridical level. The weak version, which is much more of a caricature, is an intellectually lazy or unreflective form of taqlīd. Scholarly arguments, such as al-Albānī ‘s, have made a compelling case that some Ḥanafī rulings are supported by little prophetic narration; their questions are legitimate.¹¹ The history of Islamic legal theory reveals that intra-madhhab critique and revision have always been part of the tradition, and not an aberration.¹² To this extent, it is not categorically opposed to Sunni legal culture, and the demand for textual accountability is not unique to the Salafi; what is different is the manner in which it was exercised, that is, outside the framework of a recognized legal school, by scholars who may not have the traditional formation necessary to do ijtihād (Independent legal reasoning) responsibly. 

The Salafi critique of the veneration of shrines, ʿurs celebrations, and tawassul (Seeking intercession) practiced at mazār hits the sweet spot of popular Bengali Islam at the devotional level. For many traditional Sunnis, this argument is not a theological challenge, but a rejection of a vital spiritual tradition, or even of the holiness of the awliyāʾ that is integral to local Muslim life. The social role of these institutions, which are part of the pastoral care, conflict resolution and communal cohesion – represents precisely the dimension that Salafi criticism tends to overlook and cannot easily dismiss on legal grounds. The most significant challenge to the traditional authority of the ʿulamāʾ at the institutional level is posed by Political Salafism. In the American context, but more generally, Sherman Jackson has pointed out that the current crisis of Islamic religious authority in America is linked at least in part to the breakdown of three factors that previously allowed the ʿulamāʾ to be seen as “credible”: financial independence, community trust, and continuity of education.¹³ The vacuum created within the Waqf Board by state capture, negligence in funding Islamic education in public schools, and social isolation of traditional ʿulamāʾ has paved the way for Political Salafism in Bangladesh to fill. Spokespersons are frequently young, media savvy, and able to answer modern questions in modern idiom — a facility that traditionally trained scholars do not always possess.

Certainty as Identity: Young Muslims and the Salafi Appeal

The generation-specific dimension of this transition deserves sustained attention. For a majority of young Bangladeshi Muslims—educated, digitally connected, and frequently navigating the conflicting pressures of secular modernity and religious identity—Political Salafism provides a psychologically appealing sense of certainty. In a landscape of interpretative diversity and institutional inconsistency, the Salafi emphasis on a return to the original, unbiased texts of the Qur’ān and authenticated sunnah offers a compelling sense of certainty. Sociologist Olivier Roy contends that modern Islamic revivalism frequently entails a “deterritorialization” of Islam, marked by an exclusion from local, ethnic, and cultural specifics in favor of a universal, textual identity.¹⁴ This resonates deeply in Bangladesh, where globalization has both disrupted traditional communal structures and connected young people to a vast international Muslim community that Salafi networks are particularly adept at mediating. There is also what might be termed an epistemological modernity at work here. The Salafi approach, a method that relies on chapter and verse, evidence, and questions, inheriting authority, is structurally very similar to the approach of rationalist argumentation that educated young people are exposed to in their secular school education. This is not to say Salafism is secular; it is not at all. But it is polemical and takes advantage of a modernist distrust of authority, which traditional institutions do not properly address.

A Sunni Reflection: Renewal and the Limits of Rupture

The right answer to these challenges from within the classical Sunni tradition is not defensive rejection, nor mass accommodation. It calls instead for the use of the tradition’s logic in both tajdīd (revival of religion) and authority. Imām al-Ghazālī’s work in Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences) is illustrative.¹⁵  Al-Ghazālī did not advocate rejecting legal tradition during a period of crisis for the civilizational community, which included the division of the Abbasid caliphate, the emergence of theological schools, and a sense of spiritual void in the formal juristic culture. Instead, he pleaded for it to be revived from within, through the blending of the spiritual depth tasawwuf (Islamic spirituality) with legal rigor. For al-Ghazālī, renewal was always a return to the meaning of tradition, not its rejection. In his theory of ijtihād, Shāh Walī Allāh al-Dihlawī (17th-18th century) in Delhi accommodated the notion of referring to ḥadīth to resolve disagreements in jurisprudence without abandoning the framework of the madhhab. Perhaps the most intellectually sophisticated premodern work on the tension between fidelity to text and tradition in law is his al-Inṣāf fī Bayān Sabab al-Ikhtilāf (The Balanced Judgment Concerning the Reasons for Juristic Disagreement), which Political Salafism raises but, in its polemical forms, does not adequately answer.¹⁶

Throughout the tradition, the understanding of the concept of tajdīd — renewal — has always been quite distinct, in that renewal does not involve replacing the entire inherited architecture, but rather restoring that which is genuine. Imām al-Nawawī’s meticulous commentary on Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim,¹⁷ Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s Fatḥ al-Bārī, his celebrated commentary on Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī,¹⁸ are the kind of textually rigorous, institutionally embedded scholarship that Salafism claims to promote, but which it often neglects to use. These scholars did not see the law itself as a barrier to ḥadīth engagement, but they saw it as the framework in which ḥadīth can be engaged responsibly. What the Salafi challenge should inspire, however, is not a complacent traditionalism but a commitment to the intellectual and institutional framework which can pave the way to genuine tajdīd: a good education in ḥadīth, a critique of the defects of some popular practices, and a re-commitment to the spiritual formation which the khānqāh tradition at its best offers.

Future Prospects: Trajectories and Risks

There are several possible pathways forward, with no fixed path. One trajectory is the continued institutional development of Salafis: more mosques, more social media penetration, more students who went abroad and came back with Salafi degrees. This trajectory could increase polarization in the Muslim society of Bangladesh and, at the fringes, contribute to the more radical tendencies if Political Salafism does not live up to its promise of principled political engagement. A more promising future path lies in what might be described as intellectual engagement: the answer to the Salafist threat is not to be found in fatwa-based condemnations, but in careful scholarship that reveals the coherence, depth, and ongoing vitality of the classical tradition. Institutions such as Darul Ulūm Deoband¹⁹ and Al-Azhar²⁰ have attempted this, with mixed results. The ʿulamāʾ institutions in Bangladesh— qawmī madrasas, the ʿāliyā system and independent scholarly circles—have sufficient human and textual resources to make such a response, yet they will require institutional reform and a desire to accept modernity on its own terms. The most constructive option is structured dialogue, not the superficial ecumenism of “we are all believers of the same God”, but the kind of dialogue which the Islamic intellectual tradition, in its best form, has always appreciated: dialogue that is based on text, has its own goals, is mutually respectful, and is not superficial. Disagreements between Salafi and traditional Sunni scholars are genuine, and they involve issues of real importance. They have differences on a common basis of trust in the authority of the Qur’ān and the prophetic sunna, and that basis is more extensive than polemics on either side recognize.

The emergence of Political Salafism in Bangladesh is a phenomenon that is not alarming to the scholars and must be discussed. It asks questions about the interconnection of traditions and texts, its relation to social conditions, and what renewal means in a globalized, digitized Muslim community that the traditional Sunni establishment can no longer and will not be able to ignore. But it has its own limitations: its failure to understand the social and spiritual roles of inherited institutions, its polemical oversimplification of complex juridical issues, and its sense of religious authority that is at odds with the collective wisdom of the classical tradition. The Sunni tradition’s answer, if it is to be sufficient, must not be a defensive consolidation of the prestige of these institutions, nor a surrender to Salafi criticism of them. It should be what al-Ghazālī envisioned: a return to the richness of the tradition, energized by a sincere spiritual approach and a disciplined mind, that will show by their own vitality the necessity and living force of the tradition. Those entrusted with safeguarding Bangladesh’s inherited Islamic tradition must rise to this challenge.

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