Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight
Читать онлайн книгу.as so often imagined but potentially postmodern, shutting down empty promises of essences and universals, giving cynical smirks to the supposed light of human reason, and revealing all opponents to be squarely situated within the specific contexts and modern regimes of sense that made them possible.
The problem, then, wouldn’t be that I’m too permissive with my religion, or too confident in bending and twisting the texts to make them say exactly what I want them to say. It’s that they are—the superstar im
Five Percenter lessons ask the question, “To make devil, what must one first do?” The lessons’ answer: “To make devil, one must begin grafting from the original.” For Salafism as I read it, everything is grafted, diluted, and corrupt. Every method is doomed. There’s something potentially liberatory in the assertion that Islam as we have received it, an Islam that has taken centuries of elaboration and systematization and generations of brilliant minds to develop, represents a pollution of the pure. The great schools and methodologies offer the helpful work of humans, but if we had to, we could survive without them. A foundational intellect like al-Ghaz
The Salafiyya look to the pristine origins as a means of anchoring and centering Islam, but what if I get the opposite result? Every interpretation, subject to the limits of interpretation, risks promoting the inauthentic. But inauthentic compared to what? When I call out others for their problematic readings, is it because I still cling to this idea that a greater authenticity awaits us out there? Where is this perfect Islam against which I measure all imperfect simulations? Without faith in the way of the Salaf as a reachable finish line, my Salafism trolls everyone, becoming the big No to all claims of apprehending the truth of the Qur’
“Straight to the sources,” everyone says, even anti-Salaf
Operating instead as a tool of alienation and negation, Salafism can perform the same destabilizing work as my pro-heresy pluralism; Salafism threatens to erase every Muslim imaginary, including mine, and then its own. If we issue Salaf
While engaging the modern phenomenon of Salafism does not instantly bring me face-to-face with the Prophet and his generation, it at least returns me to my origins, recovering the history that shaped me as a particular kind of Muslim. I didn’t simply convert to Islam, but rather the version of Islam that could come together from the books, pamphlets, and lecture tapes that people threw at me in the 1990s. I didn’t just go to Pakistan, but a particular version of Pakistan, imagined and produced by the people and institutions who brought me there and walked me through it.
These white convert dudes who end up as figures in the public personality game tend to authorize themselves through overseas travel. Hamza Yusuf found his cred in the North African desert, coming home with a white-man Orientalist narrative of having learned at the feet of what he calls “living fossils” who exist “almost halfway in the dream world,” custodians of a capitalized