Varieties of Salafism

I was going to follow up these remarks with a brief distillation of Marc Sageman's take on the different brands of Salafi Islam out there and the relevant policy ideas that following from this understanding, but I see that Sageman's already gone and distilled it himself. Read the whole thing and let me just excerpt this:

Not all Muslim fundamentalists are the same. Just like European socialists acted as a bulwark against Soviet communism last century, peaceful fundamentalist Muslim groups such as the Tablighi Jamaat may help to promote a peaceful message and repudiate terrorist violence. We need to elicit their help for they attract the same clusters of alienated young men as the Global Salafi Jihad and might provide them with a peaceful alternative to terror. Many such organizations are penetrated by the global jihad and we should help them regain their purity by unmasking those that subvert their message.

There's the crux of the matter. Throwing around terms like "Salafi preachers" as our denotation of the problem is going to wind up alienating the people who very much need to not alienate -- traditionalist Muslims who believe in a peaceful dawa strategy as the best way to spread their message. Insofar as the United States defines itself in opposition to the Salafi Dawa, people attracted to the underlying doctrine will conclude that violence is their only option. Indeed, the very use of the term can be problematic. These peaceful Salafis object to using the term to denote people like Qutb and bin Laden.