“True, Masculine Men Are Not Like Women!”: Salafism between Extremism and Democracy

Abstract

Whether we should understand Salafism in general as a security threat, as extremist, and as un-democratic and of concern to authorities is a debated question. In the article, this policy-oriented objective is addressed through an analysis of a specific non-violent Salafi ideology in Sweden, which is compared to the Swedish government’s definition of gender equality. The basic argument in this article is that we can use words like “extreme” as relational concepts, which makes them analytically useful, i.e., when the benchmark is clearly defined.