1 The Evolution of Two American Species of Scripture People - Drawing allegorically from evolutionary theory, this chapter observes the similarities and differences that have occurred in the development of Islamic scripturalism (Salafism) and Christian scripturalism (Evangelicalism). It also traces the very different paths Salafis and Evangelicals have taken to arrive in modern-day America.

6 Empowered by Common Sense - A distinctive resemblance between Salafis and Evangelicals in America is their shared rhetoric of “common sense.” This chapter uses the case of one AlMaghrib student, Ify Okoye, to theorize how it is that Salafis have picked up these rhetorical markers that have been part of American Evangelicalism for centuries.

I am sitting in a large lecture hall at a local public university listening to a dynamic speaker. It’s a Sunday evening, not a typical time for class, but the hall is filled. I’m surrounded by eager students, and I am awash with déjà vu.

4 Education and the Democratization of Scripture - One outworking of the parallel Salafi and Evangelical attachments to scripture is that they build massive educational networks to facilitate popular access to scriptural knowledge and scholarship. This chapter juxtaposes a traditional American Muslim educational institution (Zaytuna College) with the much larger and more diffuse, Salafi-inspired AlMaghrib Institute to show how distinctive scripturalist pedagogies and educational philosophy operate.

7 - Can We Call Salafism (or Evangelicalism) a Movement? - Despite frequent assertions that Salafis and Evangelicals are scriptural “literalists,” these communities are riven by sharp theological and interpretive debates. This chapter explores a major debate in both American scripturalist community in recent years – gay identity and gay marriage – to show the process of interpretive schism and how it fragments both movements.

5 How “American” Can Salafism Be? - This chapter takes up the topic of extremism and violence, contrasting the lives of two American Salafi shaykhs: the infamous American terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki and AlMaghrib director Waleed Basyouni. Both men’s views of violence are profoundly shaped by the American government’s reaction to 9/11, but the case of Basyouni shows how Salafism became an unthreatening, mainstream part of American Islam.

America is a strange place to do religion. It was ever so. From the multifarious mix of dissenting and establishment Protestants – the flotsam and jetsam of the warring Reformations – who came to settle European colonies on the stolen lands of native peoples to the multitudes of Central and Eastern European Jews and Irish-Italian-Polish Catholics who came yearning to breathe free, escaping famine and persecution from the Old World; from the Black churches that managed to forge, out of the slavers’ religion, a tradition of empowerment, hope, and liberation, to the various Black Muslims who have reconstituted and reinhabited pre-slavery Islamic identities; from the legions of immigrant communities who have brought and adapted their religions on American shores to the countless spiritual innovators who have alloyed and invented new American styles of religious belonging: Mormons, Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, Seventh-day Adventists, New Agers, Nation of Islam adherents, Theosophists, and Pentecostals – if you can say nothing else about American religion, it’s energetic, entrepreneurial, and eclectic.

2 What Is a Salafi or an Evangelical Anyway? - The boundaries of Salafism and Evangelicalism are very difficult to define, because both are premised on a personal and communal attachment to scripture that does not always map onto institutional membership (belonging) or theological criteria (believing). This chapter argues that it is the distinctive Salafi and Evangelical approach to identifying with scripture (behaving) that offers the best path to understanding their real-world impact.

3 Splitting the Atom of Text and Tradition - Contrary to many assertions that they are “conservative” or “traditional,” Salafis and Evangelicals actually rebel against tradition by taking a direct, popularized approach to scripture. This chapter profiles two paradigmatic Evangelical and Salafi anti-traditionalists (Charles G. Finney and Nasir al-Din al-Albani) to show how this untraditionalism has influenced modern American Salafi preachers and thinkers.