| |
Who or what is a Salafi?
Is their approach valid?
ŠNuh Ha Mim Keller 1995
The word
salafi or "early Muslim"
in traditional Islamic scholarship means someone who died within the first four
hundred years after the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), including
scholars such as Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafi'i, and Ahmad 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-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.
In terms of
ideals, the movement advocated a return to a shari'a-minded orthodoxy that would
purify Islam from unwarranted accretions, the criteria for judging which would
be the Qur'an and hadith. Now, these ideals are noble, and I don't think anyone
would disagree with their importance. The only points of disagreement are how
these objectives are to be defined, and how the program is to be carried out. It
is difficult in a few words to properly 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 a collection of essays called "The Re-Formers of
Islam".
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:
1. that their
interpretations are acceptable in terms of Arabic language;
2. that they
have exhaustive mastery of all the primary texts that relate to each question,
and
3. that they
have full familiarity of the methodology of usul al-fiqh or
"fundamentals of jurisprudence" needed to comprehensively join between all the
primary texts.
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.
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 in the West. For example,
the work Fiqh al-sunna by the author Sayyid Sabiq, recently translated into
English, presents hadith evidences for rulings corresponding to about 95 percent
of those of the Shafi'i school. Which is a welcome contribution, but by no means
a "final word" about these rulings, for each of the four schools has a large
literature of hadith evidences, and not just the Shafi'i school reflected by
Sabiq's work. The Maliki school has the Mudawwana of Imam Malik, for
example, and the Hanafi 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 in
them is condemned to be ignorant of the hadith evidence for a great many Hanafi
positions.
What I am trying
to say is that there is a large fictional element involved when someone comes to
the Muslims and says, "No one has understood Islam properly except the Prophet
(Allah bless him and give him peace) 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 disciplines impose upon Muslims the
obligation to know and understand their work, in the same way that serious
comprehension of any other scholarly field obliges one to have studied the works
of its major scholars who have dealt with 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 acknowledge another scholar on the face
of the earth besides the Imam of their madhhab, the Sheikh of their Islam, or
some contemporary scholar or other. And this sort of enthusiasm is
understandable, even acceptable (at a human level) in a non-scholar. But only to
the degree that it does not become ta'assub or bigotry, meaning that one
believes one may put down Muslims who follow other qualified scholars. At that
point it is haram, because it is part of the sectarianism (tafarruq)
among Muslims that Islam condemns.
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.
| |
|