who or what is a salafi

8/9/2019 Who or What is a Salafi

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Who or what is a Salafi? Is their approach valid?Their basic claim is that Islam has not been properly understood by

anyone since the prophet Mohammed and the early Muslims--except

themselves.By Nuh Ha Mim Keller The word salafi or "early Muslim" in traditional Islamic scholarship meanssomeone who died within the first four hundred years after the prophetMohammed, including scholars such as Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafi'i, andAhmad ibn Hanbal. Anyone who died after this is one of the khalaf or"latter-day Muslims".

The term "Salafi" was revived as a slogan and movement, among latter-dayMuslims, by the followers of Muhammad Abdu (the student of Jamal al-Dinal-Afghani) some thirteen centuries after the prophet Mohammed,approximately a hundred years ago. Like similar movements that havehistorically appeared in Islam, its basic claim was that the religion had not

been properly understood by anyone since the prophet Mohammed and

the early Muslims--and themselves.

In terms of ideals, the movement advocated a return to a shari'a-mindedorthodoxy that would purify Islam from unwarranted accretions, the criteriafor judging which would be the Qur'an and hadith. Now, these ideals arenoble, and I don't think anyone would disagree with their importance. Theonly points of disagreement are how these objectives are to be defined, andhow the program is to be carried out. It is difficult in a few words toproperly deal with all the aspects of the movement and the issues involved,but I hope to publish a fuller treatment later this year, insha'Allah, in acollection of essays called "The Re-Formers of Islam".

As for its validity, one may note that the Salafi approach is an interpretationof the texts of the Qur'an and sunna, or rather a body of interpretation, andas such, those who advance its claims are subject to the same rigorouscriteria of the Islamic sciences as anyone else who makes interpretiveclaims about the Qur'an and sunna; namely, they must show:

1. that their interpretations are acceptable in terms of Arabic language;

2. that they have exhaustive mastery of all the primary texts that relate toeach question, and

3. That they have full familiarity of the methodology of usul al-fiqh or

"fundamentals of jurisprudence" needed to comprehensively join betweenall the primary texts.

Only when one has these qualifications can one legitimately produce a validinterpretive claim about the texts, which is called ijtihad or "deduction of shari'a" from the primary sources. Without these qualifications, the mostone can legitimately claim is to reproduce such an interpretive claim fromsomeone who definitely has these qualifications; namely, one of thoseunanimously recognized by the Umma as such since the times of the true



salaf , at their forefront the mujtahid Imams of the four madhhabs or"schools of jurisprudence".

As for scholars today who do not have the qualifications of a mujtahid, it isnot clear to me why they should be considered mujtahids by default, suchas when it is said that someone is "the greatest living scholar of the sunna"

any more than we could qualify a school-child on the playground as aphysicist by saying, "He is the greatest physicist on the playground". Claimsto Islamic knowledge do not come about by default. Slogans about"following the Qur'an and sunna" sound good in theory, but in practice itcomes down to a question of scholarship, and who will sort out for theMuslim the thousands of shari'a questions that arise in his life. Oneeventually realizes that one has to choose between following the ijtihad of areal mujtahid , or the ijtihad of some or another "movement leader", whosequalifications may simply be a matter of reputation, something which isoften made and circulated among people without a grasp of the issues.

What comes to many people's minds these days when one says "Salafis" is

bearded young men arguing about deen. The basic hope of these youthfulreformers seems to be that argument and conflict will eventually wear downany resistance or disagreement to their positions, which will thus result inpurifying Islam. Here, I think education, on all sides, could do much toimprove the situation.

The reality of the case is that the mujtahid Imams, those whose task it wasto deduce the Islamic shari'a from the Qur'an and hadith, were inagreement about most rulings; while those they disagreed about, they hadgood reason to, whether because the Arabic could be understood in morethan one way, or because the particular Qur'an or hadith text admitted of qualifications given in other texts (some of them acceptable for reasons of legal methodology to one mujtahid but not another), and so forth.

Because of the lack of hard information in English, the legitimacy of scholarly difference on shari'a rulings is often lost sight of among Muslims inthe West. For example, the work Fiqh al-sunna by the author Sayyid Sabiq,recently translated into English, presents hadith evidences for rulingscorresponding to about 95 percent of those of the Shafi'i school. Which is awelcome contribution, but by no means has a ³final word´ about theserulings, for each of the four schools had a large literature of hadithevidences, and not just the Shafi'i school reflected by Sabiq's work. TheMaliki school has the Mudawwana of Imam Malik, for example, and theHanafi school has the Sharh ma'ani al-athar [Explanation of meanings of hadith] and Sharh mushkil al-athar [Explanation of problematic hadiths],

both by the great hadith Imam Abu Jafar al-Tahawi, the latter work of which has recently been published in sixteen volumes by Mu'assasa al-Risala in Beirut. Whoever has not read these and does not know what is inthem¶ is condemned to be ignorant of the hadith evidence for a great manyHanafi positions.

What I am trying to say is that there is a large fictional element involvedwhen someone comes to the Muslims and says, "No one has understood

Islam properly except the prophet Mohammed and early Muslims, and



our sheikh". This is not valid, for the enduring works of first-rank Imams of hadith, jurisprudence, Qur'anic exegesis, and other shari'a disciplinesimpose upon Muslims the obligation to know and understand their work, inthe same way that serious comprehension of any other scholarly fieldobliges one to have studied the works of its major scholars who have dealtwith its issues and solved its questions. Without such study, one is doomed

to repeat mistakes already made and rebutted in the past.

Most of us have acquaintances among this Umma who hardly acknowledgeanother scholar on the face of the earth besides the Imam of theirmadhhab, the Sheikh of their Islam, or some contemporary scholar orother. And this sort of enthusiasm is understandable, even acceptable (at ahuman level) in a non-scholar. But only to the degree that it does notbecome ta'assub or bigotry, meaning that one believes one may put downMuslims who follow other qualified scholars. At that point it is haram,because it is part of the sectarianism (tafarruq) among Muslims that Islamcondemns.

When one gains Islamic knowledge and puts fiction aside, one sees thatsuperlatives about particular scholars such as "the greatest" are untenable;that each of the four schools of classical Islamic jurisprudence has hadmany, many luminaries. To imagine that all preceding scholarship should beevaluated in terms of this or that "Great Reformer" is to ready oneself for abig letdown, because intellectually it cannot be supported. I remember oncehearing a law student at the University of Chicago say: "I'm not saying thatChicago has everything. It¶s just that no place else has anything." Nothing justifies transposing this kind of attitude onto our scholarly resources inIslam, whether it is called "Islamic Movement", "Salafism", or somethingelse, and the sooner we leave it behind, the better it will be for our Islamicscholarship, our sense of reality, and for our deen.

who or what is a salafi

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