The Salaf as-Salih and the “salafites”
According to the definition of the fuqaha the true Salaf as-Salih are those who act correctly, i.e. who act at the right time and in the right place, and who act in accordance with the first generations of Muslims. They are those referred to by Muslim as recorded in his Sahih from ‘Imran bin Husayn from the Prophet may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him: ‘The best of this umma are the generation to whom I was sent, then those people who followed after them’; and in another narration from Ayesha, radi allahu ‘anha, who on asking the Prophet, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, who were the best of people he replied: ‘The generation of people I am now (living) amongst, then the second generation, then the third . These then include the inhabitants of Madina al-Munawwara who followed the great imams of Madina, Malik, Asad ibn al-Furat, Ibn al-Ashhab, Abu ‘Abd Allah ‘Abd al-Rahman Ibn al-Qasim al-‘Utaqi, Ibn Wahb and those who took from the latter like Sahnun ibn Sa’id ibn Habib at-Tanukhi , may Allah be pleased with them all, as well as those who later confirmed these first generations of Madina like Ibn Abi Zayd, Ibn ‘Ashir and Ibn Rushd al-Jadd – they are the true Salaf as-Salih because they held to the indubitable validity of the transmission of the model of a whole society by tens of thousands of Companions to hundreds of thousands of tabi’un and tabi at-tabi’un; and thus to the mu’amalat: the weights and measures of Madina, its transactions, its markets, its contracts, its caravans, its gold and its silver, its success as a thriving trading centre, its abhorrence of any unlawful increase (riba), in short to the mu’amalat; as well of course to the ibadat. This is the society about whom Allah, may He be exalted, speaks in sura at-Tawba, the society which was born of the meeting of the Muhajirun and the Ansar, the meeting of those who had not been able to establish the deen in all its comprehensiveness in Makka with those who made it possible:
The forerunners – the first of the Muhajirun and the Ansar – and those who have followed them in doing good: Allah is pleased with them and they are pleased with Him. He has prepared Gardens for them with rivers flowing under them, remaining in them timelessly for ever and ever. That is the great victory.
The Salaf then are the predecessors of all the Muslims about whom the Rasul, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, has spoken so highly of. No one however is making an exhortation to regression into the Middle Ages as the media would have their audience believe (although of course they are referring to their Middle Ages which was indeed for the most part dark and dank). What the Messenger, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, is indicating is that they were the highest model to be followed. So we turn to them in imitation in order to establish light in the present times of darkness; but we do not hold to the mindless mantra of progression. Rather we live with a technology subordinated to this dominant reality of balanced, healthy men and women who have worship at the centre of their social existence.
What is being considered then is how we are to follow them, for follow them we must, according to all men of knowledge whatever their madhhab, whatever their age. We must follow them with wisdom which means – in this age of casino capitalism and debt enslavement – applying their social and economic model in order to free ourselves and those amongst the non-Muslims who want this quality of freedom – freiheit. This freiheit shall not be obtained by uneducated pawns – bearing Muslims names – of a terror scenario overseen by and at times even devised by a security system that strives to go seamlessly total and global; rather it shall be obtained by addressing and seeking the cure to the illness through a much deeper understanding and a closer following of the practice of the salaf, through the implementation of that half of the deen ignored by the present day salafites.
The true Salaf do not belong to marginal terror organisations. How could they? Suicide is totally forbidden. We are forbidden by Allah to cause even the slightest harm to ourselves and a fortiori to commit suicide also:
Do not cast yourselves into destruction .
Muslim relates that Abu Huraira related that the Prophet, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said:
He who kills himself with an iron (instrument) shall remain endlessly for ever and ever in the Fire of Gehannam and he shall have that weapon in his hand thrusting it in his stomach for ever and ever; he who drinks poison and kills himself shall sip of this (same poison) in the Fire of Gehannam where he shall remain endlessly for ever and ever; and he who kills himself by falling from (the top of) a mountain shall fall constantly into the Fire of Gehannam and shall remain there endlessly for ever and ever.
in his commentary on the Sahih Muslim Qadi Iyyad points out is that this proof for Imam Malik, may Allah have mercy on him, that the talion for the person who commits suicide applies just as if would apply if the person killed another: in other words the same punishment is inflicted on his self in the Fire as he inflicted on it in the world.
And Jundab narrated that the Prophet may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him said:
A man was wounded and he killed himself and so Allah, may His might and majesty be magnified, said: My slave has rushed upon Me with his self and I have forbidden him the Garden
And Abu Huraira related that the Prophet, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said:
He who throttles himself shall throttle himself in the Fire and he who stabs himself shall stab himself in the Fire
And Thabit bin ad-Dhahhak related that the Prophet, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said:
Whoever kills himself with an iron (instrument) shall be tortured with it in the Fire of Gehannam .
All of the actions of the Salaf as-Salih were manifest, open, in company. We only know the deen because nothing the Messenger, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, did he did alone. Dissembling – taqiya – is foreign to Muslims. Secrecy is not the way of the salaf for they have nothing to hide. The multiplication of number-based transactions, passwords, coded information which characterise the society we live in are indicative of the reduction of the zone of freedom to the inner realm of the personal: only an encoded freedom accessible to the individual is tolerated. While true salaf are vibrant social, outgoing, men and women who draw from the source communities as they want a life based on knowledge, who seek to live the whole of the deen of Islam and understand the technological demands of the age, the salafites have reduced Islam to a religion, to a way of narrowness and mere piety. And their deen is mostly in their heads, a concept, an ideal, and like all ideals unrealisable. The mu’amulat, the forgotten chapters of life, are nowhere to be seen in their behaviour. Behaviour is reduced to endless nawafil salat, recitation of Quran and study of non-madhhab based hadith without an understanding of fiqh which might give them an insight into a practical application of the entirety of Allah’s commands and the Messenger’s teachings. They admonish the kuffar but adopt their social and economic modes of behaviour while proclaiming their intensity of iman. A whole generation was educated in the USA under the illusion that they could ‘take the tech know how’ without being deeply programmed by the University system they took it from. After inadequate reflection many, like the shia, have come to see the enemy as embodied in this country despite one respected survey showing that the Muslim population in the USA tripled to 2.6 million in 10 years . They claim to embody the way of the earliest generations but hold more closely to the disjointed model of Shaykh Ibn al-Wahhab who purified Islam into a ‘religion’ when he handed over the social, economic and political realm to the tribe of Al Saud. This is in blatant opposition to his insistence on tawhid – the unified understanding of Allah, his deen and His creation as a whole. They laud Shaykh Ibn Taymiyya but few have read his works – not surprising given their level of education and his use of tortured logic to reject the logicians; but while they rightly reject with him the mutazalite fascination for logic, they completely ignore his high regard for the way of the people of Madina and of the essential truth of tasawwuf, when understood as ihsan; they also have a tendency, like their alleged master, to criticise others, in particular scholars; the least they could learn from his mastery of the logic of his opponents is that their endless championing of the slogan ‘kitab and sunna’ – while they themselves live otherwise – renders this slogan mere rhetoric, not in any way an utterance connected to any known demonstrable proof. Their impatience with the accretions of legal judgements over the centuries should have taken them back to Madina, the home of the Kitab and Sunna par excellence. More importantly they fail to see that Ibn Taymiyya is not in fact their leader, neither intellectually or in person, he having been dead for centuries. They have no leader for a leader must be alive, flesh and blood. Most do not come anywhere close to an understanding of another of their iconic leaders, Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawzi, himself a student of Ibn Taymiyya. Their mode of being is often dominated by negation and rejection and, as is evident from the questionnaire submitted to them by Maulana Shaykh ‘Ali Laraki, share many aspects in common with the Ikhwan: they have an uneasy relationship with women and pay lip service to Allah’s prohibition of usury – refusing to undertake any positive measures to establish proper markets, legal gold and silver currency or the taking of zakat. The rampant corruption and clear failure of their only feeble response – Islamic banking – is now clear even to them. This rejectionist stance has its roots in the rebellion of Shaykh Ibn Wahhab against the Osmanli Devlet and continues today with their continued refusal to acknowledge the necessity of bay’a – the oath of allegiance to the person in authority. Here they find common ground with the shia, albeit from a different approach road. It is of little use to anyone if one clings to minor aspects of the prophetic model while ignoring the basics. Pious insistence on the nawafil fasts of Monday and Thursday while ignoring the fard of zakat -collected as tax at the command of the ruler, not given as sadaqa – is a prevalent aspect of their modus vivendi and applies in their respect to all the mu’amalat. It is easy to be tough on their women folk but hard to take active measures to revive true markets or establish the minting of gold and silver coins. This withdrawal from the obligation to establish justice in the world on the part of the salafites has ironically contributed to the growing taste for the propagation of a ‘personal’ Islam by the media who in effect declare ‘this Islam of concepts, in the head, in the home, cut off from real life – we can deal with’. The media, whose bosses are from the ranks of the capitalists, thus sanction a way of being which shall in no way impede the machinations of the casino stock markets. The salafites have become a convenient category of theirs into which they shovel all those Muslims who are not merely passive consumers, distinguished only by a domestic Islam from the non-Muslims.
These characteristics of the salafites serve to engender a kind of pious person who is coming dangerously close to adopting the christian model of personal worship at restricted times of the year – accompanied by a total freedom – read unfettered economic activity – in the world. Historically the salafites have reached the point where the christians abandoned the prohibition of usury, abandoned intrinsic wealth and abandoned justice in the markets in favour of ‘religion’, i.e. a manner of existing severed from the life force itself. It leads inevitably to passivity and then to consumerism and a tacit acceptance of a democracy which then sanctions their domestic religious isolation. But while the non-Muslims are rewarded with total sexual licence in virtually all domains, the christian-like piety of the salafites prevents them from indulging in this licence and in a knee-jerk reaction they even forbid themselves Allah’s licence regarding the permitted number of wives, interpreting away the explicit ayat in modernistic terms could scarcely in tune with the true salaf.
Wherever they are in the world they recognise each other but this is a religious brethren and excludes the Muslims at large who naturally yearn for a deen which includes them and their worldly activities. Disturbing too is the increasing number of mosques on the Arabian Peninsula with stained glass windows, back rests and chairs placed at the disposal of the worshippers. No doubt not legally prohibited but bearing a dangerous resemblance to churches. The salafites – together with their coreligionists the ikhwan – through misplaced piety have cut themselves off from the joy of living which can only be tasted by entering the deen completely and realising that the true, full spirituality of the age is to be found in the mu’amalat, not necessarily in the mosque exclusively.
So while the rhetoric of the salafites is ‘kitab and sunna’, the part of the kitab and sunna acted upon is carefully selected to ensure the maximum pious effect; but this rejection, this turning away from establishing normal activities in the world according to the pattern of the Messenger, sallallahu alayhi was sallam brings frustration to the young who necessarily are still in touch with the fitra, however faintly. They want to act but the path of mu’amalat has been blocked by the dominance of salafite/ikhwani ulama who restrict teachings to iman and pious undertakings. It is not surprising some aspiring salafites, unhappy in the world, blow themselves up in a world they see as non-pious and irrelevant, being for them merely a fitna , not being for them a realm of positive activity. Not even those salafites dubbed as militant by the media – who by their militancy are active in the world – are essentially different for the goal after the fighting seems to be the establishment of a status quo in which an Islam reduced to the domestic within a capitalist world mode purified of wine and pork reigns.
The true Salaf as-Salih knew what a treasure they had and naturally wanted to share it; and they still know. This is the secret to the explosive expansion of the deen to the waters of the Atlantic up to the lands of the Chinese in the first centuries of Islam. The salafites however are marked by their extreme reticence with regard to dawa. As one of them remarked ‘We must rather work, brother, to increase the imam of the Muslims, we have enough Muslims as it is’. What strange aqida is this? And who are they to know of the iman of others when it is basically a hidden matter? Besides, their aspect is often forbidding, hardly conducive to bringing people into the society of Islam. The sadaqa of a smile would offset the length of their beards. A beard is of course a noble thing, the veil of the Muslim, but whenever little of the practice of the Messenger, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, is left but this, then imbalance is the order of the day. A beard is of personal benefit both in this world and the next, the implementation of the mu’amalat is of social benefit.
The salafite movement is a grouping nurtured by the ‘experts’ on Islam with the support of the media many of whose adherents follow with enthusiasm the script supplied to them, not unlike the manner in which those addicted to TV soaps adopt the screen discourse into their own lives. But not even Ibn Taymiyya would have understood.