476 Annabelle Böttcher
read Arabic. Therefore, those communities or institutions that wish
to engage in the transfer of religious knowledge either teach Arabic or
go through great pains translating Salafi works into other languages.
This immense investment in translations has also been displayed by the
Leipzig Salafis. Many of their texts are painstakingly translated (from
English, Turkish or even from Bosnian) into German to make their
selection of texts accessible to non-Arabic-speaking communities and
thus expand the transnational Salafi networks. Strikingly, they do not
take their texts directly from the Arabic originals as one would expect
from a group that claims to always go back to the sources. This raises
questions about the group’s definition of “sources”. This feature rather
reinforces the impression that its insistence on authentic sources has
much more to do with a self-emancipating habitus than with realities
on the ground. The authors displayed on their websites are, on the one
hand, well-known scholars from the Salafi tradition and, on the other,
quite unknown names, most probably members or sympathizers of
the Leipzig mosque. The selection presents a global Salafi community
from many different countries such as India, South Africa, the United
States, Europe and the Balkans. It reveals a clear preference for authors
from the Ḥanbalī school of law. Nevertheless, in the section on the life
of the Prophet and Islamic history there are also a number of biogra-
phies of representatives from other schools of law, among them the
founder of the Ḥanafī school, Abū Ḥanīfa,^59 the founder of the Shāfiʿī
school, al-Shāfiʿī,^60 and Ibn Kathīr (d. 1373), also a Shāfiʿī scholar with
Ḥanbalī leanings.^61
During a surveil in August 2008, a total of 65 authors appeared
in August 2008. While some texts do not mention any author at all,
Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ al-Munajjid, a well-known contemporary Saudi
Muslim scholar, is the person with the largest number of texts on the
website. He studied with the Wahhabi state establishment, including
59 Salaf.de: Kurzbiographie von Imam Abu Hanifa (80–150 n. H.). Excerpt tak-
en from Siyar A’lamun-Nubala; translated from English into German by Abū
Imrān, 2004; online: http://www.salaf.de/swf/sir0009.swf, accessed Dec. 04,
2010, five pages.
60 Salaf.de: Kurzbiographie von Imam asch-Schafi’i (132–204 n. H.). Excerpt taken
from Siyar A’lamun-Nubala Siyar A’lamun-Nubala; translated from English
into German by Abū Imrān, 2004; online: http://www.salaf.de/swf/sir0015.swf,
accessed Dec. 04, 2010.
61 Salaf.de: Kurzbiographie von Imam Ibn Kathir, translated from English into
German by Azad Ibn Muhammad, 2004; online: http://www.salaf.de/swf/
sir0017.swf, accessed Dec. 04, 2010, three pages.
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