The Officially Sanctioned Dictionary

I have always admired how most Salafists seem to talk and think alike. Out of the 6346 verses in the Quran and the millions of ahadith (sayings of the Prophet), they even seem to quote the same ones. Maybe there’s a microchip implanted in their brains. Every night, during ishaak prayers, satellite transmissions apprise the chip of the latest happenings, polemics and fatwa (religious edicts). Sadly, that isn’t the case. The true reason has more to do with the slim range of materials that Salafists normally tap into.

The word Salafist, of course, is derived from the word Salaf, which in turn refers to the early succeeding generations of the Prophet Muhammad. Salafist scholars claim to obtain their understanding of Islam directly from these Pious Predecessors, as opposed to the majority who follow the understanding of a traditonal madhhab (School of Thought).

The word madhhab is derived from an Arabic word meaning “to go” or “to take as a way”, and refers to a mujtahid’s (a scholar entrusted with deducing law from scripture) choice in regard to a number of interpretive possibilities in deriving the rule of Allah from the primary texts of the Qur’an and hadith on a particular question. In a larger sense, a madhhab represents the entire school of thought of a particular mujtahid Imam, such as Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafi’i, or Ahmad–together with many first-rank scholars that came after each of these in their respective schools. [source: Masud.co.uk]

Salafists often quote a hadith that seems, on the surface at least, to doubt the value of madhhab and cement the merit of their viewpoint .

"The best of my Ummah is my generation, then those who follow them."

Then again, the claim faces a logical hurdle. It undoubtedly implies that early jurists, who were closer in time to the Pious Predecessors, inherited neither the complete Salaf’s understanding of religion nor their methodology.

This couched superiority is still very much in evidence, where scholars trained in the classical tradition are discouraged, if not banned from teaching and preaching in Islam’s holiest precincts. Oddly, their cause has been picked up by The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. In a 2004 report, the Commission highlighted that "those who do not adhere to the officially sanctioned strain of Sunni Islam practiced in the country can face severe repercussions from religious police."

But how do we tell the difference between followers of the officially sanctioned strain and those that aren’t? Easy- by their idiolect. Here is a list of 7 keywords (in descending order) that crop up often in any conversation with officially sanctioned Muslims:

7. Wahhab- Wahhab is one of the 99 Names of God, meaning knowledge. When a Muslim is named after one of the Divine Names, he has to add an ‘abdul’ in front, which effectively means ’servant of’. Abdul Wahhab thus means ’servant of God’, just as Abdul Rahman or Abdul Rahim does. Most Westerners use the term Wahhabi to refer to the Salafist movement started by Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab in the 18th century. This flies wildly off-the-mark since Abdul Wahhab is actually the name of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab’s father. The ibn means ’son of’. Except for a few nonconformists, Salafists by and large detest being called Wahhabi.

Nonetheless, the Salafist strain which now controls Mecca and Medina had an unmistakable beginning in Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab’s polemics.

I rank Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab in the last place because his name is seldom mentioned by Salafists outside Saudi Arabia. This, I attribute to the divergence between the historical Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab and the ideological entity that apologists have propped up.

Bin Baaz’s (a name I shall come to in due time) biography of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, for example, mentions his father as a great jurisprudent and judge without mentioning that the latter had been one of his son’s earliest and most vociferous critics. Bin Baaz cannot have been unaware of this since he reserves quite colorful terms for Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab’s detractors; terms like ‘characterless’, ‘envious’, ‘ignorant’ and the ever-functional ‘idiot’.

In reality, the idiots included Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab’s father, his brother Suleyman ibn Abdul Wahhab (also a respected judge), both his earliest teachers Muhammad ibn Sulaiman al-Kurdi and Muhammad Hayat al-Sindhi, the sage Muhammad ibn Sulayman Effendi, the four traditional jurists of Mecca and last but not least, the chief mufti, Sayyid Ahmad Zayni Dahlan who was, as the Sayyid appellation suggests, a descendant of Prophet Muhammad.

6. Baaz- I must confess that when I first encountered his name, I thought he was an African-American rapper. Abdul-Aziz bin Abdullah ibn Baaz served as Saudi Arabia’s chief mufti from 1993 until he died in 1999. He is greatly admired by Salafists the world over for his staunch commitment to Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab ideals. He might have been cast from the same mold.

In a book published in 1974, entitled "Evidence that the Earth is Standing Still", Bin Baaz famously revoked a theory that had been first advanced by Muslim scientists:

"If the earth is rotating as they claim, the countries, the mountains, the trees, the rivers, and the oceans will have no bottom and the people will see the eastern countries move to the west and the western countries move to the east."

It’s not surprising that the first thing he did when attaining high office was to issue this fatwa:

"The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished."

Even Carl Sagan, author of the superstition-busting Demon-Haunted World, was led to comment that the shaykh’s "…opinions have often raised eyebrows or embarrassed worldly Saudis…"

I wonder what Bin Baaz had to say about Astronaut Sultan bin Salman’s (on the right) tight shorts.

Later, on being informed of the reality by a Saudi astronaut, Bin Baaz grudgingly gave ground, but not by much.

5. Ikhwan- Ikhwan means brother. Not to be confused with the Egyptian Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimoon (Muslim Brotherhood), the Saudi Ikhwan nonetheless had its fair share of tribulations. The second Saudi state created the militant-cum-religious organization in 1912 to revive its alliance with the inheritors of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab’s flagellant ideology. Ikhwan shock-troopers were extremely successful in Saudi conquests but committed numerous atrocities against Muslims who refused to dance to their tune. Their treatment of the Bedouin tribes, especially, was particularly cruel.

Their extremism and eventual rebellion against what they saw as the Saud clan’s betrayal of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab’s ideals forced the kingdom to disarm and disband them. They were reorganized and became the Saudi National Guard, one of whose duties is to protect the royal family from possible coups instigated by the regular army.

The religious face of the defunct Ikhwan did not entirely vanish but re-materialized as the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, or Mutaween, whose achievements include the deaths of 15 children in an inferno.

4. Taimiyya- One of the great scholars of the 14h century, who attracted controversy for his disdain of the four classical schools of Islam. He was nonetheless a towering exponent of Imam Hanbal’s jurisprudence. I covered Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab’s connection with ibn Taimiyya in this essay. I will only add that some Salafists are so awe-struck by ibn Taimiyya to the point of excluding all

other great thinkers and scholars of historical Islam. The Biographies link on this website says it all.

3. Bid’ah- Or innovation. Traditional scholars classify innovations as good and bad. I’ll take the practice of using prayer beads in zikir (remembrance of God through sustained chanting of Quranic verses or even God’s name) as an example. A Salafist website lists it as being a reprehensible innovation, while Sheikh ‘Atiyyah Saqr, former head of Al-Azhar (an institution that has thus far avoided the Salafist stream) Fatwa Committee, adopts an opposite view and goes on to reiterate the traditional Islamic view that "it is not permissible at all to brand any act as bid’ah just because it did not exist during the Prophet’s lifetime."

Saa’d Ibn Abdul Rahman Al-Saud. Incriminating evidence? Or fashion statement?

Nonetheless, Bid’ah figures prominently in Salafist discourse. One THC reader speculated that Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab’s extreme methods of spreading his ideology had been prompted by the extreme bid’ah of his time. This is unnecessarily dense, since nowhere in Islam is the phrase "the ends justifies the means" given any serious thought. And it also presumes that Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab had faced a greater trial in evangelicalism than Prophet Muhammad himself, who scorned extremism in religion, did.

2. Rafidha- Or ‘rejectionists of religion’. Salafists use this pejorative term on Shia Muslims in general. This approach is informed by ibn Taimiyya’s and Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab’ own resentment of the Shia. Ibn Taymiyya, once asked rather rhetorically of the Shia: "Is there to be found (anyone) more astray than a people who show enmity to the first and foremost (in faith)…and who ally themselves with the disbelievers and hypocrites?"

The demonizing of the Shia has found fullest expression in what I term the Salafist Triangle; made up of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. It’s hardly surprising that when the Taliban were running affairs in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were two of only three countries to recognize them.

1. Firqa al-najiya- The Saved Sect. This incorporates the belief that only one sect out of a multitude of others is bound for paradise. No prizes for guessing which sect that will be. Saved Sectees (I once shortened it to SS in an online forum as a personal joke. It could either mean Saved Sect or the more infamous Waffen-SS, you see) assiduously believe themselves to be in a minority. Almost all websites that purport to represent Firqa al-najiya use, in one form or another, a tract written by Muhammed ibn Jameel Zaynoo. It’s enthusiastically reprinted <a

href=”http://www.ahya.org/amm/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=15″ target=”_blank”>here, <a

href=”http://www.sunnahonline.com/ilm/ibaanah/vol3j.htm” target=”blank”>here and <a

href=”http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/9958/saved.html” target=”_blank”> here. If you’ve been reading THC a long time, you’d know that some of the most influential thinkers have heartily endorsed the notion that only a few Muslims within the Ummah are true Muslims.

The moral? It’s not a mystery, is it? Go get an officially-sanctioned dictionary.

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