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The term "Salafi" was revived as a slogan and movement, among latter- day
Muslims, by the followers of Muhammad Abduh (the student of Jamal al-Din al-
Afghani) some thirteen centuries after the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him
peace), approximately a hundred years ago. Like similar movements that have
historically appeared in Islam, its basic claim was that the religion had not been
properly understood by anyone since the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him
peace) and the early Muslims--and themselves.
As for its validity, one may note that the Salafi approach is an interpretation of
the texts of the Qur'an and sunna, or rather a body of interpretation, and as such,
those who advance its claims are subject to the same rigorous criteria of the
Islamic sciences as anyone else who makes interpretive claims about the Qur'an
and sunna; namely, they must show:
Only when one has these qualifications can one legitimately produce a valid
interpretive claim about the texts, which is called ijtihad or "deduction of shari'a"
from the primary sources. Without these qualifications, the most one can
legitimately claim is to reproduce such an interpretive claim from someone who
definitely has these qualifications; namely, one of those unanimously 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 is not
clear to me why they should be considered mujtahids by default, such as 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 a physicist by saying, "He is
the greatest physicist on the playground". Claims to Islamic knowledge do not
come about by default. Slogans about "following the Qur'an and sunna" sound
good in theory, but in practice it comes down to a question of scholarship, and
who will sort out for the Muslim the thousands of shari'a questions that arise in
his life. One eventually realizes that one has to choose between following the
ijtihad of a real mujtahid, or the ijtihad of some or another "movement leader",
whose qualifications may simply be a matter of reputation, something which is
often made and circulated among people without a grasp of the issues.
What comes to many peoples minds these days when one says "Salafis" is
bearded young men arguing about din. The basic hope of these youthful
reformers seems to be that argument and conflict will eventually wear down any
resistance or disagreement to their positions, which will thus result in purifying
Islam. Here, I think education, on all sides, could do much to improve the
situation.
The reality of the case is that the mujtahid Imams, those whose task it was to
deduce the Islamic shari'a from the Qur'an and hadith, were in agreement about
most rulings; while those they disagreed about, they had good reason to, whether
because the Arabic could be understood in more than 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.
When one gains Islamic knowledge and puts fiction aside, one sees that
superlatives about particular scholars such as "the greatest" are untenable; that
each of the four schools of classical Islamic jurisprudence has had many many
luminaries. To imagine that all preceding scholarship should be evaluated in
terms of this or that "Great Reformer" is to ready oneself for a big letdown,
because intellectually it cannot be supported. I remember once hearing a law
student at the University of Chicago say: "I'm not saying that Chicago has
everything. Its just that no place else has anything." Nothing justifies transposing
this kind of attitude onto our scholarly resources in Islam, whether it is called
"Islamic Movement", "Salafism", or something else, and the sooner we leave it
behind, the better it will be for our Islamic scholarship, our sense of reality, and
for our din.