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"It is due time that moderate Muslims realize that they are in a state of war with puritan Muslims." - El Fadl The following is drawn in its entirety from El Fadl: To win this very real war that has done inestimable damage to so many Muslims and to the truth of the Islamic faith, it is absolutely imperative that moderates declare a counter-jihad against the puritan heresy. This is not a call for the shedding of blood; it is a call for matching the zeal of puritans through unrelenting intellectual activism. This is a counter-jihad to reclaim the truth about the Islamic faith and win the hearts and minds of Muslims and non-Muslims all around the world. "According to the Wahhabis, it was imperative to return to a presumed pristine, simple, and straightforward Islam, which was believed to be entirely reclaimable by a literal implementation of the commands and precedents of the Prophet, and by a strict adherence to correct ritual practice. In effect, the Wahhabis treated religious texts - the Qur'an and the Sunna - as an instruction manual to a virtual utopia modeled after the Prophet's city-state in Medina. If only Muslims would return to adopting the correct beliefs and practices mandated by God, the reasons for their backwardness and for their collective sense of humiliation would disappear because Muslims would once again earn God's favor and support." It is important to note that Wahhabism did not spread in the modern Muslim world under its own banner. Rather, it spread under the banner of Salafism. Salafism appealed to a very basic and fundamental concept in Islam – that Muslims ought to follow the precedents of the Prophet and his Rightly Guided Companions as well as the pious early generations. Methodologically and in substance, Salafism was nearly identical to Wahhabism, except that Wahhabism was far less tolerant of diversity and differences of opinions. In many ways, Salafism was intuitively undeniable, partly because of its epistemological promise: it offered a worldview that was difficult to deny or challenge. The founders of Salafism maintained that on all issues, Muslims ought to return to the original sources of the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet. In doing so, Muslims ought to reinterpret the original sources in light of modern needs and demands without being slavishly bound to the interpretive precedents of earlier Muslim generations. But as originally conceived, Salafism was not necessarily anti-intellectual, but like Wahhabism it did tend to be uninterested in history. By emphasizing a presumed “golden age” in Islam, the adherents of Salafism idealized the time of the Prophet and his Companions, and ignored or were uninterested in the balance of Islamic history. Furthermore, by rejecting juristic precedents and undervaluing tradition as a source of authoritativeness, Salafism adopted a form of egalitarianism that deconstructed traditional notions of established authority within Islam. According to Salafism, effectively anyone was considered qualified to return to the original sources and speak for God. The very logic and premise of Salafism was that any commoner or layperson could read the Qur’an and the books containing the traditions of the Prophet and his Companions and then issue legal judgments. Taken to the extreme, this meant that each individual Muslim could fabricate his own version of Islamic law. Effectively, by liberating Muslims from the burdens of the technocratic tradition of the jurists, Salafism contributed to the vacuum of authority in contemporary Islam. – El Fadl

2022-11-14 16:49