Abstract
The article examines the media practices of a German Salafi missionary through the perspective of theories on Islamic authority and digital online marketing. Following an understanding of online Salafism as a cross-platform phenomenon, the paper draws on an ethnographic case study of Salafi Influencer Abdurrashid, examining the specific strategies he develops for his channels on YouTube and TikTok, the synergies he generates between them, and the active outreach measures through which he creates a gateway for his YouTube profile via TikTok in order to gain authority.
Introduction
It has shifted to social media. It’s much easier for the preachers and they reach a hundred times as many people when they just go online. (Abdurrashid, 8 June 2022).1
This is how Aburrashid, a Salafi online influencer and the interlocutor on whom I build this article, described a key development that parts of the Salafi scene have undergone in Germany in recent years. By the mid-2010s, as a result of provocative public proselytising campaigns and public sermons, Salafism had gained widespread societal attention in Germany. Under pressure from bans on associations, increased surveillance by security authorities and restrictions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, many Salafis have since shifted their activities to spaces outside the public sphere and have established a new presence in digital spaces. There, the example of my interlocutor shows, they deliberately develop specific marketing strategies adapted from professional online influencers to spread their version of the “true” Islam and gain interpretative authority (ibid.).
The Salafiyya represents a movement within Sunni Islam that is highly exclusivist, but also highly internally differentiated and factionalised.2 Salafis share with other Muslims the recognition of the Qur’an as divine revelation and of Muhammad as God’s final messenger. Beyond that, they reject the developments or changes – whether theological, institutional, doctrinal or ritual – that took place after the first three generations of Muslims. The ideological construction of these first three generations, called the pious forefathers (al-salaf al-salih – hence Salafi and Salafiyya), is the constitutive aspect of Salafist movements and the central point of reference after Allah and the Qur’an (Thurston, 2016: 6). Following from this, the central aim is the restoration of what they consider to be the authentic Islam. However, the various Salafi currents differ considerably in the methods they use to achieve this goal, which include private education, public proselytising, political action and violence.3
The online activities of Salafi actors have been the subject of intensive interdisciplinary research. The focus in the phenomenon of online Salafism centred for a long time primarily on the role of the Internet in radicalisation processes or jihadist propaganda and the non-jihadist information contributions are only gradually becoming apparent.4 In addition to the prominent role of YouTube, the use of the video-based digital network TikTok on the scene has increased remarkably through recent years and an increasing number of religious influencers use these platforms simultaneously. This raises the question of the strategies, motives and reciprocal dynamics of the parallel use of both video-based applications by Salafi preachers as cross-platform approaches have so far been underinvestigated. Moreover, findings on online Salafism are almost invariably obtained from a distance i.e., through online access, and exclude the media practitioners themselves.5
Therefore, by analysing the case of Abdurrashid, who has been running Salafi channels on YouTube and TikTok since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, I intend to contribute to a deeper understanding of the marketing strategies, ways of authority-making and reciprocal dynamics between the platforms and their operator. The ethnographic approach pursued for this purpose integrates the online monitoring of the two channels and regular conversations with Abdurrashid into an ethnographic long-term observation, making it possible to include the actor’s social environment and personal motives for his media practices.
To this end, I draw on the literature on religious authority and digital influencer marketing. A seminal contribution is Simon Sorgenfrei’s “Branding Salafism: Salafi Missionaries as Social Media Influencers” (2022), which demonstrates that Salafi online activists deliberately adapt the branding strategies of contemporary online influencers to acquire followers and gain authority. Proceeding from here, I analyse those digital strategies that my interlocutor is actively pursuing to generate reach and sharpen his profile as a Salafi content creator.
This article emerges from my work on the dynamics between religious ideals and lifeworld demands in contemporary Salafiyya in Germany. The material presented was coproduced between 2018 and 2022 as part of my ethnographic research in a major German city. It includes an interview with Abdurrashid and various conversations with his companions from the initial fieldwork phase in 2018/19 and records of encounters in a mosque from that time. Between June and September 2022, we met several times and I recorded three interviews of three to four hours each. All meetings took place in the kitchen of Abdurrashid’s rented apartment while his wife was out of the house. During the same period, I monitored his channels on YouTube and TikTok together with the project’s research assistant Lorraine Stein. In addition, Abdurrashid and I were in contact via WhatsApp, and he repeatedly alerted me to the latest developments on his channels. To protect the privacy of my interlocutor, I have changed his name and refrained from disclosing his channels in the references.
The article comprises five sections. The first provides a brief overview of the research so far carried out on the phenomenon of (German-language) online Salafism and then presents the central technological characteristics of YouTube and TikTok and the most recent findings of the German-language Salafi information bubble.6 This is followed by an ethnographic vignette that sets out Abdurrashid’s relationship with the digital “attention industry”. The third section discusses the extent to which Salafi influencing can be understood as a form of Islamic authority-making. The fourth section, then, analyses the protagonist’s digital marketing strategies and shows that he adopts channel-specific approaches, which he integrates into his overall strategy to acquire followers and thus construct authority. Lack of space means that I cannot provide a comprehensive theological profile. A discussion of the results concludes the article.
1 Online Salafism on YouTube and TikTok
In recent years, numerous publications have appeared on the phenomenon of Salafi online activities, especially the role of the Internet in the radicalisation into jihadism (e.g., Rudner, 2017; Gendron, 2017).7 Other studies examine the representation of non-jihadi Salafi groups or individual preachers (Klevesath et al., 2021), as well as particular digital media such as online forums (Becker, 2009) or social networks such as Instagram (Sorgenfrei, 2022). But the video-sharing service YouTube in particular has broad significance as a “knowledge platform” (Baaken, Hartwig and Meyer, 2019: 20).8 In English-language search results of Islam-related queries, Salafiyya-inspired actors now “dominate the ecosystem of religious videos” on the platform (Comerford, Ayad and Guhl, 2021: 5).9 Outside of the jihadist realm, a German-language Islamist/Salafist information bubble has also established itself, to which access takes place via heavily trafficked gateway channels that cannot be classified as Islamist/Salafist (Baaken, Hartwig and Meyer, 2019: 23). Simple “allowed or forbidden” or “how to” questions, requests for information about global events (Coronavirus, Ukraine war) and informational questions (“What is a mosque?”) can therefore quickly lead users into this Salafist/Islamist microcosm (ibid: 8). Moreover, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm plays a crucial role in keeping users in this information bubble (ibid.: 7). The individual channels can either be operated by individual actors, such as PierreVogelDe, AbulBaraa Tube or Marcel Krass, or represent collectives (ibid.: 27). A special role is played by the so-called “mirror channels” that do not create their own material, but rather upload videos from other channels and thus assume the role of a magazine or archive (ibid.: 46). A well-known example is Habibiflo Dawa Produktion, which, with over 10,000 videos, is the front-runner in publication figures and archives videos of the most prominent preachers, including Pierre Vogel, Abul Baraa and Marcel Krass. The channel Stimme der Gelehrten (“Voice of the Scholars”) holds a special position, as it predominantly uploads videos of Salafi scholars subtitled with German translations (ibid.: 4).
It is only recently that NGOs working in the field of extremism prevention or the journalistic Y-Kollektiv with its YouTube report Salafistische Influencer auf TikTok: “Wir vertreten den richtigen Islam!” (“Salafist Influencers on TikTok: ‘We represent the right Islam!’”; Y-Kollektiv, 2022)10 have indicated that the video-sharing platform TikTok, which has long been widely used among young people in particular, is also rapidly gaining importance for the Salafi scene. In the report, the journalist Selma Badawi accompanies the Salafi influencer Ibrahim El-Azzazi and asks critical but suggestive questions (“Is Ibrahim dangerous?”, Y-Kollektiv, 2022: 08:36) about his activism on TikTok. Her thesis on El-Azzazi’s marketing strategy is that “first he attracts young people with consensual content and then he becomes more extreme” (ibid.: 00:32–00:37). Since this format had about 1.1 million hits within three months of publication, it seems remarkable that there have been hardly any academic publications on the topic.
TikTok is a video-sharing service and social network; it has been maintained by the Chinese company ByteDance since 2016 and has gained enormous importance in recent years.11 TikTok also focuses on videos which may last from 15 seconds (when created with the app) to a maximum of 10 minutes. According to Friedhelm Hartwig and Albrecht Hänig (2022: 13), the app’s success is particularly attributed to its technical features, such as its sophisticated algorithm.12 Newcomers to the platform can thus generate a wide reach much more quickly, and the posted videos are potentially spread further outside their bubble. However, the Salafi landscape on YouTube and TikTok is not congruent, as many new actors are also present on the latter (ibid.). Hartwig and Hänig point out that the simultaneous use of YouTube and TikTok by the same actors may exhibit different strategies and dynamics that complement each other strategically (ibid.: 15ff.). However, no in-depth studies are available that examine these assumed cross-platform media strategies or allow the actors to speak for themselves. Proceeding from these observations, I examine online Salafism as a “cross-platform phenomenon” (Comerford, Ayad and Guhl, 2021: 7) using Abdurrashid as an example to contribute to an understanding of the multimodal use of video-based platforms in Salafi missionary online activism.
2 “Then I Realised, that’s Where I Get Reach.”13
I met Abdurrashid in 2019 during ethnographic fieldwork in a major German city, where I had worked on the development of the local Salafi network. He had converted to Islam as a student at the age of 24 in a Moroccan mosque and soon became a faithful follower of Pierre Vogel, probably the most prominent German preacher.14 A group of German-speaking “brothers” had eventually formed in the Moroccan mosque and split off to found the city’s first Salafi association in 2008. Since the various inner-Salafiyya positions were evident here, there were soon “splits into 4 parties among the 7 people”,15 including the Vogel followers, Madkhali-Salafis16 and what these contemptuously referred to as “Ikhwanis”, who were more tolerant than the other groups.17 Because of these internal conflicts, the association was dissolved after about a year.18 The Vogel followers dispersed and Abdurrashid’s continuing participation in the Madkhalis’ occasional rounds of lectures again collapsed as a result of dogmatic differences. Following the principle of al-wala’ wa-l-bara’ (loyalty and disavowal), which Salafis frequently apply among themselves (see Damir-Geilsdorf, Menzfeld and Hedider, 2019), Abdurrashid ultimately withdrew from the local Salafi scene.19 In addition, the measures imposed to combat the coronavirus pandemic and his becoming unemployed in the meantime reinforced his social isolation. Although he had been doing the bookkeeping for a craft business from home in 2019, the telephone customer contact also now fell away. Apart from a weekly visit to his mother, going to the playground with one of his children and praying at the nearby mosque, where he largely avoided contact with others, he spent most of his time at home.
When we met in 2019, Abdurrashid firmly portrayed himself as an ignorant and constant learner who neither had extensive knowledge of theological and religious norms nor had mastered the Arabic language. When I visited him again in the summer of 2022, he was independently translating excerpts of speeches by Arabic-speaking Salafi scholars into German, producing short videos with a professional graphic design, and uploading them to his YouTube channel, which he has been gradually expanding since 2020 into an archive of selected Salafi positions. Abdurrashid does not appear in person at any point in this archive but, in the summer of 2021, he began operating a TikTok profile where he appears on camera and expresses his opinion on various theological and everyday issues. During the conversations we had in his kitchen in late summer 2022, he repeatedly reached for his smartphone and opened the TikTok app to check that his latest post had been noticed.
Let’s see what comments we have today. This video was taken this morning. You can see by the sweater I’m wearing. 541 views. [reads comments] “Very nicely explained”, “Thank you brother”, “Mubarak Allahu feek”, “Brother, well explained”, “Haqq.” … means truth. So everything is purely positive.20
Checking reactions and comments on the recently uploaded videos was, Abdurrashid assured me, part of his daily routine. Making sure of this attention was, I suppose, for my interlocutor a way to compensate for his increasing social isolation. He spent most of his day producing content for his online presences. Abdurrashid convincingly described himself as a Salafi. The vocabulary he used to explain his activity was that of online influencers: clicks, reach, content, comments. Yet, a new facet had been added to the restraint and modesty regarding his theological knowledge that characterised his self-portrayal in 2019: In 2022, Abdurrashid wanted to be noticed, he had something to say, and he was doing so in completely different ways on YouTube and, more recently, on TikTok.
3 Islamic Authority and Salafi Influencer Marketing
My goal is never to become known, but in order to have a reach, you have to be known. That’s the evil that’s partly associated with it. And of course, through TikTok, you become more and more famous.21
When Abdurrashid explained his online activities, his elaborations often revolved around aspects of correct Islamic knowledge on the one hand and his reach and recognition on the other. For him, as his words quoted above show, recognition is not an end in itself but only becomes legitimate in the process of disseminating correct knowledge to an audience. He thus self-consciously referred to relationality as one major aspect of Islamic authority-making.
In the works of Western Orientalists, Islamic authority has long been assumed to be a purely theological matter based on knowledge of Islamic legal sources and traditions (Sunier and Buskens, 2022: 4). This focus on a decontextualised and essential “book-Islam” neglects the fact that this supposed essence is vehemently debated among Muslims (see e.g., Bowen, 2010; Akca, 2020). In particular, Talal Asad (1986), with his conceptualisation of Islam as a “discursive tradition”, has emphasised the inseparability of the text-based normative discourse and the practices of its appropriation and reinterpretation, pointing to the historical dimension and processuality of the authentication of Islamic sources. To grasp this processual character, authority, according to Thijl Sunier and Léon Buskens (2022: 2), must therefore be understood through the practices of authority-making.
It is a process of authentication, of attributing truth to religious sources, persons and things by human beings in relation to the legitimacy of Islamic sources and rituals, triggered by societal, political and other circumstances and developments.
A central goal of Salafi influencers is to present themselves as experts in true Islam, role models who are closest to the salaf, and thus claim legitimate authority. Since the field of information offers on Islam on the Internet represents a highly competitive market, the actors must develop strategies to position themselves perceptibly in this market (Sorgenfrei, 2022: 213f.).
Similar to social media influencers […] Salafi missionaries aim to attract large followings, to gain their sympathy and trust, and to have an impact on the decisions they make. They fashion themselves as religious authorities and representatives of what they argue is authentic Islam in contrast to cultural Islam and, not the least, to the profane lifestyles of the non-Islamic majority, and, as influencers, Salafi missionaries increasingly make use of social media platforms in their endeavors to package Islam as an attractive culture for ever-growing crowds of consumers. (ibid.: 214)
According to Delphine Caruelle (2023: 623) influencers are “individuals who have large followings on social media platforms and influence, through the content they create and share on these platforms, the […] decisions of others”. Considered the most important method of generating a following and successfully marketing a product, performance, idea or ideology, is “branding”, the deliberate creation of a “brand”. Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012: 4) defines the process of branding as “a method of attaching social or cultural meaning to a commodity as a means to make it more personally resonant with an individual consumer”, as Simon Sorgenfrei (2022: 212) points out in his study of Salafi influencers in Sweden. Sorgenfrei analyses branding predominantly through the visible, that is graphic and stylistic, brand elements on Instagram. From here, I shall go a step further by looking at Abdurrashid’s particular uses of a given platform, the synergies of simultaneous utilisation and the overall strategy he follows to gain authority.
4 Abdurrashid’s Media Strategies
The architecture and modes of operation of YouTube and TikTok have been explained above. Abdurrashid also emphasised that there are striking differences between the users of the respective platforms. To him, YouTube, as an “older” medium, represents a “knowledge archive” on which primarily more educated Muslims interested in more complex topics consume videos. Accordingly, he attributed to the user base a greater ability to concentrate and a greater interest in longer lectures and sermons. In contrast, TikTok is primarily a provider of short videos with entertainment value, but current topics and debates are also addressed and discussed there. On the basis of this assessment of the two platforms and their user bases, Abdurrashid developed strategies that are specifically tailored to the respective platforms.
4.1 Expert Knowledge on YouTube
From start to finish, I now have a design that stays that way. It has a high recognition value and that is also important to me. It’s like designing a brand like Mercedes. […] And then you know that you can find all the relevant videos in a certain direction, like in a library.22
In line with the assessment of YouTube as a knowledge platform, Abdurrashid has been building an archive of videos since January 2020, in which short passages from Arabic-language sermons and speeches by mostly well-known scholars are subtitled in German. At the beginning of December 2022, his channel comprised 118 videos, which had been viewed a total of 29,635 times, and had 564 subscribers. As he is aware, he cannot be considered a scholar or sheikh and so he makes available to a German-speaking audience set pieces of statements by Salafi authorities that support his position. The translated audios are mostly extracted from long lectures and deal mainly with precise theological topics. As he explained in the conversation, he wants primarily to refute the views of “philosophical” groups among Muslims, which is a niche topic and hardly affects the lives of “average Muslims”. Although his channel can easily be attributed to the Salafiyya, Abdurrashid’s approach is rather unsystematic and he translates source material on topics that spontaneously come to his mind, so a Salafiyya internal positioning is not immediately apparent to laypersons. Many of the videos deal with the practice of ex-communication (takfir), i.e., considering that a particular Muslim should be counted among the infidels (kuffar). The relationship of Muslims to the taghut, i.e., non-Muslim gods and idols and, according to Salafi understanding, especially secular laws and systems such as democracy, is also frequently addressed and characterised as unbelief. Abdurrashid is aware that, in some videos, he presents positions that violate the constitutional law of Germany. He is nevertheless convinced that he is acting within the legal framework of freedom of expression, as he ends many videos with a disclaimer that emphasises the documentary nature of his work and excludes any incitement.23
Since Abdurrashid draws on existing audio files and does not create his own content, his archive can be considered a “mirror channel” (“Spiegelkanal”; Hartwig and Hänig, 2022: 10ff.), like the above-mentioned Stimme der Gelehrten, to which he explicitly refers. The group behind the latter website belongs to the Madkhali-current, whose followers, he is convinced, would call him a takfiri and from which he distances himself. Abdurrashid affirmed that he does not necessarily share all the positions of the sheikhs he translates, but also draws on those scholars who are accepted by “the other directions” to refute them with their own authorities.24 In this way, the Salafi influencer pursues a clear strategy for positioning himself in the inner-Salafiyya discourse.
The length of the videos varies from about 30 seconds to six-and-a-half minutes. Each begins with digitally animated, professionally designed opening credits that Abdurrashid created himself using templates from Adobe After Effects software. Abdurrashid closely follows this strategy and is neither heard nor seen in person on his channel at any point. This also applies to the way he deals with comments under the individual videos, as he restricts communication with his followers almost entirely by switching off the comment function after about 24 hours – the amount of time he allows users to point out errors in the translations. In this way, he makes it impossible to raise the matter of his own position, makes the relevant scholar’s statement unassailable to a certain extent, and prevents inquiries about the content of the videos. This approach is part of a branding strategy that decouples the content from its creator and creates a depersonalised form of Islamic authority that belongs to the channel rather than to the operator and is fed by the credibility and expertise of the quoted scholars. As a respected brand “like Mercedes”, the platform is intended to represent an archive of theological expertise that is “unique in Germany” and has a distinctive design.
4.2 Reach and Advice on TikTok
Unlike on YouTube, Abdurrashid appears in person in most of the videos on his TikTok profile, which, according to the signature, offers “short lectures about Islam”. As of early December 2022, the channel included 152 videos in the portrait style common to smartphone apps. Of these, 26 videos reflected content from his YouTube channel, and 45 videos contained short lectures spoken by Abdurrashid himself that are statically illustrated, e.g., with motifs from nature (moon, tree, water) – presumably to visualise creation. In three videos, Abdurrashid interviews German Salafi converts. The majority of the videos (86), however, feature the talking head style and directly address the audience. Abdurrashid usually sits in front of a wall with some abstract pictures, which his mother has painted and which, as the visitor knows, decorate his kitchen wall. In his lecture videos, he also strives to generate authenticity in a specific way; unlike the way he controls his YouTube posts, however, he uses TikTok as an interactive medium and allows comments.
Yesterday someone said … wanted to diss me …: “Do you read?” He wanted to hate somehow. According to the motto: “Hey, you only read!” I do not read anywhere! […] No, currently I open the laptop, think briefly about which topic … and then I just talk about it.25
Drawing freely from his knowledge base and orienting himself thematically to his followers comprise one method of his self-declared strategy to convey an authentic image of himself as an Islamic authority. Comment management is also much more geared towards interaction than on YouTube. On TikTok, he limits the restriction of communication to deleting disagreeable “hate comments”.26
In line with his strategy, the content on Abdurrashid’s TikTok profile is highly current, spontaneously produced and thematically broader than that on his YouTube channel. In addition to questions of Salafi doctrine, Abdurrashid also comments on events abroad (e.g., the World Cup in Qatar), and on social movements (e.g., veganism or LGBTQ issues) as well as on the use of social media by Muslims. In most posts, he gives simple advice on what is and is not Islamically permissible. To draw attention to his content and generate clicks, the influencer draws on common means, such as assigning hashtags that make a post appear in the results of keyword searches. Abdurrashid also uses “click-baiting” methods, such as formulating headlines as a question (Lai and Farbrot, 2014). Click-baiting is specifically used “to create a sort of tease or information gap between the headline and the article spurring curiosity among readers and, hence, increasing chances of them clicking on the headlines” (Biyani, Tsioutsiouliklis & Blackmer 2016: 96). Among the more recent 2022 videos, we find another category of audio-visual contributions new to Abdurrashid’s content production, the so-called “reaction videos”.
4.3 Reaction Videos: Outreach and Demarcation Strategies
Many of you must have seen that [the prominent islamic influencer] Issam Bayan was recently at Leeroy, together with an ex-Muslim. This is exactly the moment when someone like Issam, who is considered quite liberal, appears to the audience as orthodox or strict, in contrast to the ex-Muslim. So, she has left Islam because she’d like to have an illegitimate relationship with some kafir she dated on Tinder, and because, after all, she’s so committed to gay rights. […] Well, then she can’t go to paradise! (Abdurrashid, paraphrase from TikTok video)
This paraphrase is based on the most clicked video on Abdurrashid’s TikTok profile, with more than 20,000 hits. The post is a commentary of about six minutes on an episode of the conversation format Das Treffen mit Leeroy (“The Meeting with Leeroy”), which was published on YouTube on 8 September 2022. The channel Leeroy will’s wissen! (“Leeroy wants to know it!”) is, like the above-mentioned Y-Kollektiv, a public service production. In the episode titled MUSLIM meets Ex-MUSLIMA (Leeroy, 2022), the successful charismatic Muslim influencer Issam Bayan meets a young woman named Zeinab, who left the religion after a strict religious upbringing and, as a consequence, was threatened with death by her father. In the conversation, the influencer sees the woman’s personal experiences of oppression as a misrepresentation of his religion and regularly interrupts her to explain “real” Islam. This is also pointed out in the comments on the video, which predominantly praise the courage of the young woman and condemn the influencer’s arrogance. On the one hand, Abdurrashid then comments in a condemnatory tone on the young woman’s leaving of Islam and emphasises that unbelievers will be among the “losers” on the day of judgement. On the other, given the negative publicity, he does not criticise the “liberal” Muslim but goes on to criticize the public media, to which he attributes a fundamentally Islamophobic attitude and whose strategy he claims to expose. Here, he focuses on the experiences of discrimination that Muslims in Germany face daily and presents a victim narrative with which many can easily agree. This populist method diverges enormously from the approach of archiving expert knowledge on YouTube and serves a simple strategy:
I respond to these people because I simply want to increase my reach a bit, knowing well this will get clicks. The video about Leeroy and Issam has 20 thousand clicks. I’ve never had 20 thousand clicks on a video in my life.27
Consequently, Salafi influencer Abdurrashid not only pursues a branding strategy with his channels but also, as he describes in the above quote, actively uses outreach methods to reach people in the digital environments and information bubbles where they hang out and participate. Professional online marketing speaks of “content outreach” as a
type of content distribution that aims to encourage reporting on or sharing of content by establishing contact and cultivating relationships with multipliers. The target group or target persons for the outreach can be editors, bloggers, influencers and other well-connected multipliers. (Kopp, 2022; my translation)
Numerous social media influencers use synergies of cooperation for their outreach strategy and support each other as multipliers, for example through invitations, joint video conferences and staged or real confrontations. Many of these videos can be assigned to the interactive format of the “reaction video”, which has established itself as a genre of its own since the end of the 2010s, particularly on YouTube (Anderson, 2011). Reaction videos in the true sense show content creators reacting to the videos of others, usually by showing excerpts from a video that the authors of the reaction video then watch and comment on. For example, following his visit to Leeroy, Issam Bayan invited Manuellsen, a popular rapper who had converted to Islam, to comment with him on the alleged misrepresentation of Islam by Leeroy (Bayan, 2022). By entering the substantive debate raised in the initial video, influencers take advantage of its reach. Abdurrashid also resorts to the reaction video to generate reach for his outreach strategy. However, since he does not integrate videos into his productions in order to react to them directly through facial expressions, gestures and opinion, but merely names them and comments on them, I refer to this format as “commentary videos”. Furthermore, because of his relative isolation in the scene, he cannot fall back on multipliers such as other influencers or bloggers. Instead, he takes up themes from a public debate and adopts a position with which most Muslim users will probably agree, a practice that I call “strategic discourse appropriation”. This represents a method for opening gateways that he intends to lead users to his channel and thus into the Salafi bubble. These observations support the thesis formulated by young journalist Selma Badawi in the above-mentioned YouTube report about Salafi influencer Ibrahim al-Azzazi, that Salafi influencers first target users with Islamic mainstream topics and then direct them to platforms with explicitly Salafi content.
Abdurrashid has also published a commentary on this report on TikTok and here, too, he questions the motives of El-Azzazi, who should have been aware of the – in Abdurrashid’s perception – “distorted” and disparaging portrayal in advance. At the same time, he backs him up by once again criticising the supposedly Islamophobic strategy of the public funding bodies. While the video has low click numbers compared with that discussed above, with just under 3,600 hits, it is, however, remarkable as a case of “strategic discourse appropriation” in terms of self-positioning. On the one hand, Abdurrashid again refers to a format that is aimed at the broad, predominantly non-Muslim public and was produced with public funds; in this contribution, however, the focus is on a Salafi actor from whom Abdurrashid sharply distances himself in the intra-Salafi discourse. He explained in a personal conversation that El-Azzazi “belongs to the group of ‘Recognized Scholars’. They only have the name to distance themselves from the other group, to which they ascribe me. They said, ‘Don’t listen to them! Take from the ‘Recognized Scholars!’”.28 By publicly backing El-Azzazi against criticism, Abdurrashid again positions himself on the side of Muslims in general but he also pursues demarcation strategies to locate his channels within the information bubble of online Salafism.
In his videos, Abdurrashid is reluctant to call names when it comes to intra-Salafi debate and criticism. It is obvious, however, that the subjects he addresses must be allies of El-Azzazi, such as Abul Baraa or Pierre Vogel. As explained at the outset, this article is not intended to draw up a theological profile of Abdurrashid that would make clear how his views diverge from those of his “opponents”. Nor is it only on the level of theology where he deals with them. Instead, he uses a form of indirect criticism to delegitimise the mediation methods used by other Salafi influencers:
There are preachers who give the impression that they want to make their audience laugh as much as possible […]. If you want people to laugh at your jokes, you can become stand-up comedians and make your jokes there! Religion is a serious thing! So, separate the teaching about religion from your comedy act.29.
Unlike in the case of the “liberal” Issam Bayan, he does not name an addressee in the video just paraphrased but refers to the preacher’s style. Nevertheless, it is immediately clear to some followers to whom the criticism is aimed:
TikToker1: I know such a one 😄
TikToker2: Abul baraa 😂😂😂😂😂 (Abdurrashid, TikTok comments).
Ahmad Armih, better known as Ahmad “Abul Baraa” (roughly “father of defection”) is one of the most prominent Salafi preachers in Germany. He lives in Berlin where he took up da‘wa activism in 2002 and was imam of the As-Sahaba mosque in Berlin-Wedding from 2010 until its closure was ordered in 2020.30 Many of his videos are excerpts of his talks in mosques in which he answers questions from his audience. In his sermons and lectures, Abul Baraa interacts with his audience, asking rhetorical and often joking questions about which he sometimes laughs heartily. One example is the YouTube video entitled “Einhorntapete für Kinderzimmer erlaubt?” (“Unicorn wallpapers for children’s rooms allowed?”).
Look, in general, you should refrain from such things. Scholars distinguish between animals that exist in reality and animals that do not exist in reality. For example, there is a rhinoceros. Is there a rhinoceros? … There is! Is there a monkey? … There is! Is there an elephant? … Mashallah do we want to go through all the animals? These animals exist. But now, for example … what are those … they also did ninja fighting. Ninja … [Laughter from the audience, Abul Baraa gives permission to a listener to answer. He answers “Turtles”]. The ninja what …? These Turtles, these turtles … Are there such ninja things …? [loud laughter in the audience, Abul Baraa also laughs heartily]. So, some people really believe in it! [Laughter] … There is no such thing! That’s why, it doesn’t exist in reality. You don’t have to worry about it! So now unicorn, do unicorns exist? [Pause, the audience bursts into laughter and so does Abul Baraa. The latter suddenly becomes serious again]. Yes, but if the horse looks like a horse in general, you should refrain from doing that! (Deutschsprachige Muslimische Gemeinschaft, 2021)
While debates about the legitimacy of the pictorial representations of living beings are taken quite seriously among Muslims, Abul Baraa crosses the line into absurdity in Abdurrashid’s view. This impression is reinforced by the design of the video because the background has been replaced by an image that could be a child’s bedroom wallpaper showing a starry sky, a part of a star with a smiling face, and a white unicorn with googly eyes, a blue mane and a rainbow-coloured horn.
Although Abdurrashid emphasises the theological and religious-legal divergences from the “Recognised Scholars” as the main motive for his references, a form of “strategic discourse appropriation” can also be discerned here, since he takes on precisely those Salafi influencers whom most people follow and who dominate the Salafi mainstream in Germany. By discrediting them, he ultimately brings himself into play as a more credible alternative within the Salafi information bubble.
5 Conclusion
Salafi actors use the same social media platforms to disseminate their understanding of “true” Islam, employ the same marketing methods as professional influencers and can therefore be considered as such themselves (Sorgenfrei, 2022). The analysis of Abdurrashid’s online activities on YouTube and TikTok has shown the range of methods he integrates into his media strategy. Through these, he seeks, on the one hand, to distinguish himself within the Salafiyya and, on the other, to gain followers and generate reach for his messages in order to construct and claim religious authority. This article thus contributes to a body of research that considers religion in general (e.g. Evolvi, 2019; Campbell and Tsuria, 2022) and Islam in particular (e.g. Sunier and Buskens, 2022; Rozehnal, 2022) in close relation to societal and technological developments and shows that the transmission of religion no longer takes place only in formalised institutional settings and societies (Bano, 2022) but increasingly finds new and innovative ways, such as smartphone apps or novel social media formats.
The comparative analysis of Abdurrashid’s use of YouTube and TikTok has illustrated that he takes different approaches for each, which he integrates into his overarching authority-making strategy. On the “knowledge platform” YouTube, to whose users he attributes a longer attention span, Abdurrashid creates an archive of self-produced videos of excerpts from Arabic addresses by Salafi scholars, subtitled with his own translations. He uses visible branding elements here (Miles, 2014: 106–8; Sorgenfrei, 2022: 220) such as a uniform design and an animated intro to create a respected brand “like Mercedes”. The channel is supposed to represent an archive of theological expertise “unique in Germany” with a distinctive design. He himself does not appear in person at any point and thus, to a certain extent, takes a back seat. On TikTok, however, Abdurrashid himself appears and expresses his opinion in videos on topics in Salafi doctrine as well as on current socio-political issues. The fact that the contributions are presented in an impromptu manner is of particular importance to the influencer, who regards the spontaneous expression of his knowledge repertoire as a sign of authenticity. Unlike on YouTube, Abdurrashid pursues an active outreach strategy on TikTok to acquire followers through commentary videos, for example, with which he intervenes in current debates related to Islam; I have termed this “strategic discursive appropriation”. When he refers to widely viewed videos by well-known influencers, he takes positions that are likely to meet with the approval of most Muslims and thereby establishes acceptance of his persona. By also posting content from his YouTube-archive on TikTok, he reveals himself to be the creator of the former so that the latter represents a potential gateway through which audiences can find him on YouTube. It is the simultaneous use of the two video-based platforms with their different modes of function, uses and audiences that enables Abdurrashid’s specific strategy to claim authority for him as an online preacher. He is adept at using influencer-marketing methods to establish his archive and himself as a brand. This includes the graphic and acoustic design elements on YouTube, his appearance as a skilled and knowledgeable narrator and authentic personality on TikTok, active outreach measures and, finally, the strategic simultaneous use of the video-based platforms. His social media activities enable him to meet two challenges: First, as a convert who has no formal Islamic education, he claims religious authority online by demonstrating not his knowledge of Islamic sources but his knowledge of scholarly opinions, which he has also researched online. It is the cited scholars’ authority on which he builds his own claim. Second, I assume that his online activities also represent a substitute for his social isolation – that is, the loss of being socially integrated into actual Salafi networks – and an attempt to regain social recognition through the intense digital demonstration of belonging (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004) to a transnational Salafi discursive community whose “graduated publics” (Zillinger, 2017) he transcends and integrates through his social media strategy.31
In conclusion, it can be assumed that adaptation to new media formats such as TikTok contributes to a multiplication of the practices of Islamic authority-making and influences the standards of Islamic knowledge. Currently, the trend is towards the broadest possible circulation of short and banal advice for the purpose of generating reach and attention. Institutionalised forms of authority based on “specialist knowledge of traditional Islamic sciences” (Bano, 2022: 32) are thus given competition by clever marketing strategies and short formats in which scholarly advice is ultimately trivialised. In this way, Salafi influencers also skilfully lower the barriers to accessing Salafi information bubbles, and so it can ultimately be assumed that Salafiyya will continue to expand its influence on mainstream Islam in Germany.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my interlocutor for giving me a glimpse into his life. I am indebted to Thijl Sunier and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf and Martin Zillinger for supporting my research.
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Abdurrashid sees himself as a Salafi-influencer. He is the actor on whose activities the article is based. The interview was conducted on June 8, 2022, in his place of residence, a large German city. All empiric material from 2022 was coproduced as part of the research project Salafiyya leben. Religiöse Ideale und muslimische Praxis in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft which was carried out in collaboration of the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Institute for Languages and Cultures of the Islamicate World of the University of Cologne from 2020 to 2023. This was preceded by one year of field research conducted in 2018/19 as part of the project Countering Digital Dominance. Islamdiskurse und Gegenerzählungen in online und offline Kontexten carried out at the Center for Islamic Theology Münster. Both research projects were funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
I distinguish the terms “Salafism” and “Salafist” as politically generated, etic categories from “Salafiyya” and “Salafi” as the emic terms of self-designation. The first pair is linked to the securitization of the phenomenon that also permeates research. Therefore, I shall use the terms used by my interlocutor, who refers to himself as “Salafi” and follower of the Sunni current of “Salafiyya”. Furthermore, I refrain from mentioning statistics on supporters of Salafiyya in Germany because they are almost exclusively provided by security services, are based on non-transparent methods and generally concentrate on those branches that appear to be potentially relevant under criminal law, which means that quietist Salafis, who are likely to be the majority, are neglected or ignored (Damir-Geilsdorf and Menzfeld, 2020: 135f.).
There is an ongoing academic debate on how to conceptualise the various Salafist currents, starting from the early contribution of Quintan Wiktorowicz (2006), who distinguishes between purists, politicos and jihadists. Wiktorowicz has since been criticised and his categories further differentiated (Nedza, 2014; Wagemakers 2020) because, for example, his categories of politicos and jihadist Salafism are based on evidence from Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan (Damir-Geilsdorf and Menzfeld, 2020: 138) and thus can hardly be generalised. Moreover, jihadism is not an exclusively Salafist phenomenon; the two categories merely overlap and should therefore be analytically separated (Hummel and Logvinov, 2014: 12). On the general problematic nature of labelling practices in Salafism research, see Damir-Geilsdorf and Menzfeld (2020) and de Koning (2018).
Carmen Becker conducted research on computer-mediated communication (CMC) as early as 2009. At that time CMC involved, for example, chat rooms, online forums, e-mails and instant messages (Becker, 2009: 80).
The fact that policy makers and security interests influence the direction of research is highly critical. By considering online Salafism as a “cross-platform phenomenon” (Comerford, Ayad and Guhl, 2021), I also take up a desideratum that NGOs working in the field of deradicalization have pointed out. For reasons of academic honesty, it is therefore necessary to point out the fundamentally different objectives of researchers in academia and actors in the field of radicalisation prevention: while the task of the former is to analyse and understand, the latter’s is to judge and change. Therefore, where I cite non-academic references below, I mark their status in a footnote.
There is not space here to give a comprehensive literature overview.
Since violent and pro-violent groups understandably attract greater public attention and generate a more urgent need for action than less threatening actors, much of the research focuses on those parts of the Salafi spectrum that pose a security risk and which are mostly labelled jihadist (Damir Geilsdorf and Menzfeld, 2020: 135f.). Access to the corresponding milieus takes place primarily from a distance, i.e., predominantly online, while emic perspectives and lifeworld dimensions hardly occur (ibid.). For the German context, ethnographic interviews and participant observation are a rarity (Hummel, Kamp and Spielhaus, 2016: 21). Exceptions are Damir-Geilsdorf, Hedider and Menzfeld (2018) and Jaraba (2020).
Baaken, Hartwig and Meyer (2019) was published by the NGO modus | zad which is active in the sector of prevention of extremism and deradicalization. Given the – from an academic perspective – critical status of such information (see note 4), the reference nevertheless provides useful information about the non-jihadi Salafi information bubble on YouTube.
Comerford, Ayad and Guhl (2021) was published by the NGO Institute for Strategic Dialogue which is active in the sector of prevention of extremism and deradicalization. Given the – from an academic perspective – critical status of such information (see note 4), the reference nevertheless provides useful information on online Salafism.
Y-Kollektiv is a group of young journalists who report the world “as they experience it” (FUNK, homepage), i.e., from an explicitly subjective perspective. The project is produced by a publicly funded broadcasting cooperation. This is not, of course, an academic source, but it will be relevant as data in the following, since my interlocutor refers to the Y-Kollektiv in his videos.
The total number of TikTok users in Germany almost quadrupled from 5.5 to 20 million between 2020 and 2021 (MBN, 2021).
Hartwig and Hänig (2022) was published by the NGO modus | zad which is active in the sector of prevention of extremism. Given the – from an academic perspective – critical status of such information (see note 4), the reference nevertheless provides useful information about the non-jihadi Salafi information bubble on YouTube.
Interview on 26 September 2022. All translations of excerpts from the ethnographic material and the cited videos and channel comments are my own.
Vogel, alias Abu Hamza (b. 1978), is a former professional boxer who, after accepting Islam, studied at Umm al-Qura University in Mecca. Vogel follows Saudi state scholars such as Ibn Baz and Ibn al-Uthaymin, as well as the teachings of al-Albani (Wiedl and Becker, 2014: 194). However, he argues that some of their legal rulings need to be adapted to conditions in the diaspora. This is how he legitimises his da‘wa methods, which are more political than those of strict quietists (ibid.). Having contacts in Egypt, Vogel became politicised after the fall of Mubarak in the wake of the Arab Spring and his aloof stance turned into open support for the opposition Salafi An-Nur party (ibid.: 195). In 2016, Vogel was named in Dabiq, IS’s English-language propaganda magazine, among several imams to be killed for apostasy (Damir-Geilsdorf, Hedider and Menzfeld, 2018: 6).
Interview 7 May 2019.
A quietist-Salafist movement named after the Saudi scholar Rabi‘ b. Hadi ‘Umayr al-Madkhali (b. 1931), who has long been a prominent member of the University of Medina.
The term “Ikhwani” generally denotes a follower of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-ikhwan al-muslimun). However, as a pejorative designation of other Muslims by Salafis, it does not indicate membership of the Brotherhood, but an attitude that is tolerant of differences in faith interpretation and therefore opposes the ideal of most Salafis.
This local dynamic is part of a wider process of German Salafism, which, from 2008 on, was according to Arndt Emmerich (2023: 422) characterised by “increasing diversity and factionalism with competing groups, mergers, subsequent schisms, and future reunions, due to disputes over the justification of mass da’wa campaigns, tension between quietist and politically-minded Salafis, and contested debates on how to respond to the Arab Spring, the war in Syria and the emergence of IS”.
The principle of al-wala’ wa-l-bara’, which is practised by many Salafis, can be described as instructing Muslims to, on the one hand, strengthen their mutual loyalty through devotion to God and, on the other, distance themselves from unbelief (kufr) and unbelievers (kuffar), as well as from people and actions harmful to Islam (Damir-Geilsdorf, Menzfeld and Hedider, 2019: 2). It is also frequently applied to Salafis who follow a different creed. Mahmoud Jaraba (2020: 102) states that disavowal for Salafis means hatred of those who act contrary to God and his Prophet, his Companions and the believing monotheists, i.e., the infidels, polytheists, hypocrites, idolaters and vicious ones.
Interview 26 September 2022; comments MK.
Ibid.
Interview 26 September 2022.
In Germany, the fundamental right to freedom of opinion, freedom of the press and freedom of information is considered to be the very essence of democracy (Häberle, 2020: 74). At the same time, it is restricted when it violates other norms of the Basic Law and constitutes, for example, a “disturbance of the public peace” or a case of “incitement of the people” (ibid.: 73).
Interview, 26 July 2022. Among these are the prominent Saudi scholars Ibn Baz and Ibn Uthaymin, as well as several others who were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for their criticism of the Saudi royal family. The Saudi Salafi ‘Abdullah al-Ghunayman, as well as the influential scholar Salih al-Fawzan, whose positions are reflected in Saudi textbooks, account for by far the most videos.
Interview 26 July 2022.
Ibid; comments MK.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Abdurrashid, paraphrase from TikTok video.
One member of the mosque’s sponsoring association was the Egyptian jihadist Reda Seyam, who was allegedly involved in financing the 2002 terrorist attack in Bali and who left for Syria in 2012 and two years later became the minister of education of the so-called Islamic State (Klevesath et al., 2021: 74f.).
Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller (2004: 101) differentiate between ways of being, which are “actual social relations and practices that individuals engage in”, and ways of belonging as “practices that signal or enact an identity which concentrates a conscious connection to a particular group”. This differentiation was convincingly applied to Salafi authority-making by Zoltan Pall and Martijn de Koning (2017).
