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Abstract
The new French documentary Les Salafistes (The Salafis) that premiered January 26, 2016, in a small number of French theaters offers iconographic imagery seldom seen in the public space: a string of interviews with some of the leading jihadist militants in Mali, Tunisia, Algeria, and Iraq coupled with ghastly images of violence perpetrated by militant groups. The intention appears to be to show the irrationality of and paradox in the jihadis' discourse and actions. Unfortunately, the directors have succeeded only in reproducing already existing stereotypes of Salafis. The lack of any appropriate contextualization that problematizes the recent rise of violence in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is perhaps the film's major flaw. Despite the directors' ambition to let violent extremists discredit their own project, the documentary presents an essentialist argument that reproduces Orientalist imageries of a savage religion. Without the appropriate commentary and background overview to the conflicts featured in the film, the audiences are left alone with an extremist narrative that confirms the evocations of the West's moral, cultural, and political superiority over the East.
Keywords: Salafis, documentary, jihadis, Mali, Tuaregh
The Documentary
The genre of non-fictional film productions, otherwise known as documentaries, is cinematic storytelling designed to aesthetically engage and direct audiences.1 Les Salafistes, the recently produced French documentary about jihadi groups between February 2012 and July 2015, fits that general definition rather well.2 The directors of this biopic, Mauritanian journalist Lemine Ould Salem and French film producer François Margolin, both have had previous experience with covering violence in Muslim-majority contexts. In Les Salafistes, they present a 71-minute audiovisual description that incorporates monologues by known leaders of several jihadi groups and a wide range of repugnant images that explicate some of the violence committed by them.
The focal point rests, in part, on the cities and administrative regions of Gao and Timbuktu, both of which have been at the center of the Malian civil war and have experienced the rule of militant Salafi groups (ca. July 2012January 2013). Additional recordings originate predominantly from the Iraqi battlefields and Islamic State propaganda videos. The directors' expressed intention is to allow a number of militant Salafi advocates to explain their goals and, at the same time, show how implementing them affects...