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 means

someone who died within the first four hundred years after the prophet
Mohammed, 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 Abdu (the student of Jamal al-Din
al-Afghani) some thirteen centuries after the prophet Mohammed,
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 Mohammed

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 people's minds these days when one says "Salafis" is
bearded young men arguing about deen. 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 has a “final word” about these
rulings, for each of the four schools had 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 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
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. It’s 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 deen.