Militant Salafism is a movement of thousands of individuals from diverse backgrounds who claim a unity of both identity and purpose. Most of those militant Salafists living in the West have a tangential relationship, at best, with the Muslim world for which they claim to be fighting. To understand militant Salafism we must understand how this very particular political imaginary, one detailed in Chapter 1, was possible.

There are others who have explored the idea of the political imaginary in the context of militant Salafism, including some of the finest scholars in the area. Sageman, for example, discusses the reasons for an ‘attraction to a violent abstract global movement based on virtual ties to a virtual community’. In so doing he points to the fact that those who radicalise are claiming ties to a movement that has little concrete reality. Tibi refers to this virtual community as the ‘imagined umma’. Khosrokhavar dedicates a chapter to the topic of the imaginary politics of militant Salafism, as Cesari does two, including explicit reference to the notion of the political imaginary. Olivier Roy takes one chapter to address militant Salafism and its appeal to Muslims and in particular those in the West. There he discusses the significance of deterritorialisation and a subsequent re-Islamisation that can produce allegiance to an imagined community, and provides some very important insights. Finally here, Peter Mandaville has written the highly insightful, although theoretically complex, Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma, within which the political imaginary is considered in greater depth.