When contemporary Salafis seek examples of moral purity, they look above all to the Prophet Muḥammad, the other prophets, and the Companions of the Prophet Muḥammad. But Salafis also treat certain other Muslims as moral authorities. These figures are not selected haphazardly. They represent traditions that contributed core ideas to the Salafi worldview: interpretations of Sunni identity, attitudes about how to derive legal rulings, and ideologies about reviving the spirit of the early Muslim community. Such ideas, and the figures who articulated and represented them, find expression in a “normative-prescriptive list,” a canon.

The canon includes many figures who would not have understood themselves as contemporary Salafis understand them. In contrast to most Western scholarly accounts of Salafism, I argue that Salafism is not simply a set of ideas that has existed across the centuries; put differently, contemporary Salafism is not simply a rearticulation of positions held by figures like Shaykh Aḥmad Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), who championed exclusivist Sunni Islam in the wake of the collapse of the ʿAbbasid Caliphate (750–1258). Rather, canonization allows contemporary Salafis to retroactively portray earlier figures as part of a cohesive community. Canonization elides disagreements among these figures and strips away elements of their identities that might make contemporary Salafis uneasy. For example, Salafi processes of canonization overlook or explain away Ibn Taymiyya's partial embrace of rationalist methods in theology, his possible sympathies for Sufism, his openness to the ideal that damnation was impermanent, and even his lifelong bachelorhood. Salafis in Nigeria pass over this latter idiosyncrasy in silence even as they make marriage a central topic of their preaching. In other words, the canon reconstructs the past and mediates between that past and the present. The capacity to present a coherent and idealized past gives Salafism much of its appeal: the canon provides its adherents with theological confidence and political meaning.

The Salafi “intellectual posture” cannot be understood without reference to this canon. Immersion in the canon is what distinguishes Salafis from other Muslims, including other Muslims who reject Sufism. A Muslim who condemns Sufis but preserves an attachment to a legal school or to Ashʿarī theology or who has no connection to the world of contemporary Salafi scholarship is not fully Salafi.