Mind the Beard! Deference, Purity and Islamization of Everyday Life as Micro-factors in a Salafi Cultural Epidemiology

Salafism has come to the fore of research on Islam, only recently. Some have even termed it a ‘new religious movement’. Faced with what appears to be a growing popularity of Salafism, researchers have made attempts at explaining the basic factors in this development. Most explanations have related to the popularity in particular social settings, and hence have mainly focused contextual factors of a political, social or economic character. From a theoretical perspective of a “cultural epidemiology”, the article suggests that complementary to factors on a macro- or meso-level, there are certain micro-factors related to general human psychological, cognitive and emotional dispositions that, at least hypothetically, are of interest to the main question: why is Salafism successful, and in so diverse contexts?