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. 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. Claims to Islamic knowledge do not come about by default. 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".Īs 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". 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.
LIST OF SALAFI SCHOLARS FULL
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. that they have exhaustive mastery of all the primary texts that relate to each question, andģ. that their interpretations are acceptable in terms of Arabic language Ģ.
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".Īs 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:ġ.
The only points of disagreement are how these objectives are to be defined, and how the program is to be carried out. Now, these ideals are noble, and I don't think anyone would disagree with their importance. 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. 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. 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. Anyone who died after this is one of the khalaf or "latter-day Muslims".
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.