Berkley Center

In states as varied as Morocco, Egypt, Niger, and Kenya, government authorities have framed the issue as countering Salafism—often considered to be both violent and politically-engaged—through the patronage of Sufism, which has been explained as essentially tolerant, peaceful, and politically dormant. Among many states, particularly those in West Africa with a French colonial history, an office for Islamic affairs functions to effectively exclude Salafi preachers from mosques and Islamic schools that are under state control and restrict the religious arena to local clerics and Sufi brotherhoods committed to versions of Islam that are essentially politically dormant.

These dynamics highlight growing attention to the role that religious elite mobilization is playing in escalating or defusing social tension that has the potential to coalesce along sectarian lines. Religious leaders can provide the ideological justification to create conditions for violent collective action in societies riven by polarized social cleavages. At other times, however, such elites can call for tolerance and religious coexistence, and even directly mediate in conflicts. Under what conditions do religious actors support nonviolence, and what are the consequences when the state attempts to intervene for such ends? Identifying when religious groups support nonviolent action means first contending with a more fundamental first-order question: how to delineate those circumstances in which religious actors support any political action, let alone those circumstances when such political action takes the form of non-violence. Often overlooked is the fact that both Salafi and Sufi activity have historically taken many forms that include political quietism, as well as both violent and nonviolent political engagement. For example, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram both trace their roots to Salafi movements that began in Somalia and Nigeria in the 1970s. Elsewhere, such as in the cases of Niger and Senegal, contemporary Salafi clerics have urged their followers to abstain from politics and to confine their activities to peaceful missionary activities. At still other times, Salafis have formed political parties and engaged in electoral politics without resort to violence.

Although not a separate sect or school of Islamic jurisprudence, Sufism has come to be equated with a popular or traditional folk manifestation of Islam in discourses about the development of the religion in Africa, owing to the principal role played by Sufi brotherhoods in spreading Islam across the continent in the pre-modern and colonial era. While today Sufis are generally thought of as apolitical and tolerant, Sufi movements once led armed resistance against colonial rule in Algeria and Sudan. Indeed, virtually all “militant” reform movements since the seventeenth century were led by Sufi scholars, including that of Uthman Dan Fodio, who founded the Sokoto caliphate in Nigeria.

At other times, however, Sufi leaders were willing to accommodate European colonial orders. In French West Africa, for example, a policy to co-opt Sufi brotherhoods perceived as peaceful was undertaken in Mauritania, Gambia, and Senegal. In the latter case, this accommodation led to Sufi brotherhoods playing a decisive political role in national politics. This compromise entrenched Sufi brotherhoods in the colonial administration and offered them an economic base to develop institutional authority that, in turn, led to the development of clientalist networks and a measure of economic and political power that they have used to influence Senegalese political life ever since. All this suggests an ideological flexibility when it comes to the political expression of both Sufi and Salafi religious tendencies.

Why do state regimes take on the role of a manifestly religious actor in favor of building up an institutionalized version of Sufism? In many cases, they have reinforced Sufi religious orders as a force in order to undercut religiously-inspired threats to their power, because such orders have tended to be politically pliant, particularly in states where Sufi brotherhoods had collaborated with colonial governments. In particular, contemporary regimes patronize an explicitly nonviolent and politically quietist version of Sufi Islam when facing either a challenge in the electoral arena from political Islamists, as in Algeria or Morocco, or a threat from violent Islamist militants. They have done so to take advantage of the real or perceived capacity of Sufi orders for mobilizing followers, to lend religious credibility to their policy, and to demobilize potentially oppositional social actors.

In the context of contemporary policy discussions about solving violent extremism, the desire to promote nonviolent religious discourse frequently becomes conflated with promoting a vision of Islam that is manifestly apolitical and monolithically believed to be represented by unique strands within that tradition. Policymakers would do well to consider the ideological flexibility of both Sufi and Salafi movements over time, and seek out those social conditions that determine when and where nonviolent political engagement becomes manifest.