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This chapter concentrates on the theological aspects of Salafism that attract non-Muslims in postunification Germany. It argues that certain characteristics of Salafism, particularly its conversionism, literalism, and anticulturalist, antinationalist stance, make it appealing to many Germans of diverse backgrounds. In these respects, it works in quite similar ways to Evangelism and Pentecostalism in fulfilling people spiritually and psychologically—aspects greatly ignored by most scholars of contemporary Islam and especially Salafism. The chapter contends that it is these characteristics of Salafism, which introduces itself as free of human interpretation and independent of national tradition, that works well in the anti-Muslim context of Germany.

What is the situation of religious freedom in contemporary Islam? What are the positions of conservative and reformist Muslims on blasphemy, apostasy and heresy? Are there any substantive differences between Sunnis and Shi‘is on the main points of this subject? What is this book’s original contribution to scholarship? Although the focus of this book is the critical analysis of religious freedom and the penalty sanctioned for the commission of blasphemy and apostasy from a Shi‘i perspective, this inquiry would be incomplete without a review of the general outline of Sunni Muslim positions on the same subjects. Thus, Section one of this Introduction explores the literature review on religious freedom, blasphemy and apostasy in contemporary Sunni Islam. Section two, which is more detailed, engages in a similar literature review, but from the perspective of contemporary Shi‘i Islam. These two sections allow a comparative study of Islam’s two major denominations, their exchanges, influences and effects. Section three describes the story of how this book unfolded, analyses the genealogy of the author’s ideas in detail, introduces novel ideas applied by other Sunni and Shi‘i thinkers, and highlights the original contribution made by this book.

This chapter offers a critique of the (Orientalist-derived) notion of Islamic fatalism through an ethnographic study of devout Muslims in contemporary Egypt and their flexible attitudes concerning the will of God and the legitimacy of technological intervention in matters of medical therapy and health care. Focussing on several patients receiving regular kidney dialysis treatment in a hospital in Tanta, Egypt, the author documents the ambivalent ways devout Muslims respond to opportunities for organ transplantation, negotiating between their endorsement of official pronouncements made by leading Islamic scholars, their own interpretations of religious source texts, and the shifting material circumstances that make organ transplantation more or less available to them. The chapter concludes by arguing that the term “fatalism” obscures the subtlety and complexity of these negotiations, in so far as it (quite wrongly) presumes that divine will entails passivity or inaction on the part of religious devotees, rendering them incapable of redressing their medical ailments through biotechnological intervention, or of assessing such interventions through a calculated cost-benefit analysis.