ABSTRACT
While starting from what could be described as a “traditional” standpoint, Salafi commentaries are, nevertheless, the first of the twentieth century to move in the direction of praxis through a renewal of its exegetical categories. The term Salafi refers to an important reformist movement born in the last decades of the nineteenth century in reaction to the impact on Muslim peoples of a Europe then at the peak of its military and economic power.1
The Salafi movement can be seen as the final outcome of a process that had seen Muslim intellectuals at first enthusiastically embracing and accepting modernity. This was followed by an ever-increasing sense of disillusionment with the fact that modernity benefited the colonisers but not the colonised. The latter were excluded culturally and exploited economically, remaining on the margins of history. Albert Hourani writes:
