Salafis

Salaam,

To go in line with this one about Sufis, i give you the below;

You're becoming a Salafi when:

1) Your thaub ends closer to your knees than to your ankles
2) Your facial expression always looks like someone swore at your mother
3) You mention the word "Bid'ah" several times in Any conversation
4) When praying you look like Tutankhamun (you know-with the hands approaching the neck..)
5) You says me making this list is a Bid'ah...



I didn't really know much about them before Cairo, but from meeting some of these guys, and mainly through my flatmate who's had a few run-ins with them, it seems that they have quite a few significant differences with the "mainstream" muslim beliefs. The main two i've picked up on is regarding Madhabs and Attributes of Allah.

Basically they say following a madhab is being a "blind-follower", some of them say its wrong to do this, some go as far as to say its haraam. But the thing is, their reasoning makes no sense what so ever. I can see what they mean in that following say the Hanafi madhab is saying to yourself that your going to adhere to most of the rules in this madhab, and so restricting what you can do. But the alternative to this, is to research everything yourself and then you yourself decide what to do. So who would you trust on any Islamic issue...? The Imams of these madahibs and the THOUSANDS of scholars who have followed them who dedicted their lives to Islam, or would you follow yourself and the conclusion you come to....???

For example you have a nose bleed, does this break your wudu...? The hanafi madhab says yes, if the blood flows, this breaks your wudu. If you take the Salafi view though, you yourself have to research and find out what the ruling are and then you decide if your wudu has broken or not - you cant just "trust" the scholars of the past as this would be blind following...but surely you'd "blindly" follow one of the most eminent scholars Islam has produced than doubly or many-fold "blindly" follow yourself..!!!

The Salafis say that pretty much for every single ruling you need to find out yourself what you should be doing and shouldn't follow these scholars. I mean who has the time, the arabic qulifications, the resources etc etc etc do this...? And to do it to level which they think is more "secure" than these eminent scholars...?? And the thing is even if you follow a madhab, your not restricted to follow its rulings for Everything. In principle, for any single complete act, your allowed to follow another school...so following a madhab isn't even "blindly" following a single school of thought as they say to begin with...!!

The other contentious thing say is regarding the attributes of Allah. In many places in the Qur'an and ahadith things like the "hands" of Allah and the "face" of Allah and other body parts are mentioned. I never knew this, but Salafis actually take this literally...i.e. Allah has hands, a face etc etc...

I did an aqueeda course in Jordan with a brilliant scholar and one of the main things he emphasised was that whatever you think Allah is like, he is different from that because our minds cannot comprehend Him. And on top of this regarding quranic verses, he said whenever you have verse which could be unliteral, you compare it to a literal verse and see if it makes sense, if it doesn't then the unliteral verse means something else i.e. the literal verse is the benchmark against which you compare all the other verses. So here, the obvious literal verse is where Allah mentions he does not resemble any of his creation, so how can the Salafis take the "hand" verses and say it is literal when it would contradict another verse which is more likely to be literal...!! Again there reasoning seems to make no sense whatsoever...

The most alarming thing i have learnt about Salafis though is that they're EVERYWHERE...!! Go on the internet to an islamic website, read an islamic book etc etc...most likely its Salafi produced (classic give away - they use double vowels e.g. Islaam or emaan). I found out the other day that Dar-us-Salam, one of the leading islamic publishers in the world, is Salafi. This was confirmed when the other day i went to one of their shops and picked up a book called "Should i follow a madhab?" and basically it said "No, the people who follow madhabs are stupid and deviant and not following the quran and sunna, so dont follow a madhab"...!! They actually claim that people who follow madhabs are going Contrary to the Quran and Sunnah...!!

More (oh yes, there's more)...:

• They actually question the validity of the ahadith from Bukhari, Muslim etc...! In most Salafi books, when a hadith is mentioned, at the footnote it will say "As mentioned in Bukhari and confirmed Sahih by Al-Bani"...!!! As in the fact that it's in Bukhari isn't enough...but oh yes, Al-bani has confirmed it so yes, its sound...Whhhhaaaaaaat???? Especially since Al-Bani never actually studied with any big scholars but "taught himself"...

• They say Malikis are wrong in praying with their hands down as Imam Malik only did this as his hands were broken (there's no evidence for this...)

• They seem to love to call people "deviant" ; go on any salfi website and you'll have a section on different groups in Islam and how their all deviant and how Salafis are the only one's who are correct....

• They also have this weird "three" tawheed thing... (i always thought tawheed referred to the Oneness of Allah..)

Anyway, i''l leave my anti-salafi tirade there...i suppose the above is just somethings to incite you to research your stuff into Salafis, as the Worse thing that could happen is for you to meet Salafi and not be in the know bout what their on about...you've been warned...remember you can run, but you can't hide, a Salafi will be coming near you soon...

Salaam

Ps, As always, allah a'lam with everything