When I first came to Islam, like many converts who are relieved to be escaping from the illegitimate authority of priests and pastors who make up religious dictates for their congregations arbitrarily, I was determined to stick to daleel; Qur’an and Hadiths, not anyone’s opinion. I came to Islam to follow Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, not Imam So-and-so or Mufti What’s-his-name. Without knowing the term, I found out later that this made me a “Salafi”. OK, so, I’m a Salafi. I want to follow daleel, I want to practice Islam as it was understood by the first three generations of this Ummah. Good.
So what is the problem with that? Read a hadith, implement it. Simple, right? Except it isn’t. I was not, and am not a scholar. What may seem the obvious conclusion from any given hadith is not necessarily the right conclusion, but you won’t know that unless you have a massive amount of contextual knowledge. For example, Imam an-Nawawi said about letting your trousers hang below the ankles, “if a layman reads the hadiths on this subject, he will think it is forbidden, but a scholar who reads the hadiths knows it isn’t”
Without going into great detail, the Western sabotage of the Ottoman Empire, and the sudden establishment of Saudi Arabia as the preeminent religious authority in the Muslim world, created an ideologically unipolar Islamic intellectual universe.
The Salafis say, as I always said, “we are restoring ORIGINAL Islam, this is not a reform movement, it is a revival movement…we are not coming with a new interpretation, we are coming with the original interpretation of the religion.” This, in response to Muslims in the former Ottoman lands who found the Saudi ideology new and strange and called it Wahhabism.
OK, but when you tell people to just go directly to the texts, your revival is essentially doing a “select-all, delete” of nearly a millennium and a half of scholarship. Discussions, differences, contentious issues that have been explored and explained by ‘Ulema for over a thousand years are basically erased, and we go back to zero. And all of these discussions and debates throughout history dealt with the same daleel we are dealing with today; but the Saudi approach has been essentially to get us to dismiss all of that, or to simply not even be aware of it at all. Is it any wonder then why misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and extremism have become so common?
They have barricaded the doors to a library full of over a millennium of intellectual insight and understanding. It is akin to Mao’s cultural revolution in China. Clearing a banquet table and leaving nothing on it but dates and water.