Faith, ethical-religious imperatives, and religious intuitions evoke intense feelings. They may also enable various ways of distancing from and re-evaluating individual opinions and impulses. Believers may resort to internalized religious norms and principles of faith to evaluate strong feelings, modify them, and/or filter them. In this article, I examine understandings, evaluations and modifications of potentially “protective” or “poisonous” jealousy that I witnessed among Swiss-German Salafis who live in polygynous relationships. I show how religious-moral norms can guide intrapersonal as well as relationship-related emotional management. I thus identify Salafism’s capacity to offer evaluative tools for emotional balancing as one of the important yet underestimated motivations for becoming a Salafi Muslim. Strategies for emotional regulation are an important facet of the several negotiations between distance and closeness that are characteristic of Salafism at large.
