Representations of British Salafi Responses to the 7/7 Bombings : An Iconographical Analysis

Abstract: Mainstream media has markedly depicted Salafism in quite monolithic ways, giving an impression of uniformity in ideology and practice of this community. This picture has moreover been framed in particularly negative ways when destructive phenomena like transnational terrorism, violent Jihadism and radical insurgency are closely associated with the movement. I decided to study how British Salafist responses to the London 7/7 bombings have been represented. The aim has been to study how such an atrocious act with the capacity to divide society has stimulated the will to live in peace or conflict; and moreover, I aim to look at how these responses have been portrayed by Salafis themselves over against the depictions given by mainstream media. I have however chosen to focus on the visual iconographic representations of these responses because I found them intriguing: “a picture paints a thousand words.” The thesis conducts a critical discourse analysis of these visual representations of Salafist responses to 7/7.