Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya as Changing Salafi Icons 475
main references are the Koran and the Prophetic traditions. Refer-
ences to Ḥanbalī/Salafi sources are missing. This remoteness from the
main Ḥanbalī/Salafi figureheads in her discourse, might be part of a
much broader phenomenon in Salafi circles in Germany or even the
West at large. To shed more light on this, I will analyze the process of
how Salafis actually refer to concrete religious authorities by looking
at their (re)production of religious knowledge on the Internet.
1.4. The Salafis from Leipzig and the InternetAs Gary Bunt pointed out, Salafis generally have a strong presence
in the Internet.^53 Shaykh Ḥasan, his wife, and their followers are
extremely active in the Internet and maintain several websites. First
of all, they had a homepage in German language for their mosque,^54
with a header reading “Qurʾān, authentic Sunna and the way of the
companions”.^55 The front page had links to four other websites, which
all belonged to the same group, as will be shown below. At this first
website, the mosque welcomed the visitor and presented itself as an
“interest group of Muslims, which tries to transfer Islam on the basis
of authentic sources”.^56 Another website of theirs, http://www.salaf.de, pres-
ents itself on the front page as “authentic and informative”.^57 It is more
of a virtual bookshelf, where texts – mainly smaller, easily digestible
units – from the Salafi tradition are deposited and made available in
the German language. In the introductory text, the homepage – after a
praise to God – announces its intention of “passing authentic knowl-
edge about Islam through its modest contributions”.^58 Under the cate-
gories dogma, Koran, Sunna, religious duty and Islamic jurisprudence,
education and purification, sermon, method (manhaj), biography of
the Prophet and Islamic history, society and life, language, and a sec-
tion “for non-Muslims”, a wide variety of texts is made accessible
to the reader. However, the core titles of Salafi teachings are written
in Arabic language, which creates an obstacle for those who do not
53 Bunt, Virtually Islamic, pp. 37–38.
54 http://www.alrahman-moschee.de/home.html, accessed May 30, 2008.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 See front-page http://www.salaf.de, accessed Dec. 03, 2010.
58 See front-page http://www.salaf. de/startseite/html, accessed Dec. 03, 2010.
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