Salafi movement
[29] The treatises of the medieval proto-Salafist theologian Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328 C.E/ 728 A.H), which played the most significant role in formalizing the creedal, social and political positions of Ahl al-Hadith; constitute the most widely referred classical works in Salafi seminaries.
; who completely condemn taqlid (imitation), rejecting the authority of the legal schools, and oblige Muslims to seek religious rulings (fatwa) issued by scholars exclusively based on the Qur'an and Hadith; with no intermediary involved.
[51] In contemporary era, al-Albani and his disciples, in particular, would directly criticise Wahhabis on the issue of Taqlid due to their affinity towards the Hanbali school and called for a re-generated Wahhabism purified of elements contrary to doctrines of the Salaf.
Early Zahirite scholar Ibn Hazm's condemnation of Taqlid and calls to break free from the interpretive system of the canonized schools by espousing a Fiqh directly grounded on Qura'n and Hadith; have conferred a major impact on the Salafiyya movement.
"[86][87] In his biographical dictionary Siyar a`lam al-nubala, Athari theologian Al-Dhahabi described his teacher Ibn Taymiyya as a person who "supported the pure Sunna and al-Tariqa al-Salafiyah (Salafiyah way or methodology)"; referring to his non-conformist juristic approach that was based on direct understanding of Scriptures and his practice of issuing fatwas that contradicted the madhabs.
By seeking to capture values of the Salaf in their own lives, Salafis attempt to recreate a 'golden age', and revive a pristine version of Islam, stripped of all later accretions, including the four schools of law as well as popular Sufism.
All these reformist tendencies merged into the early Salafiyya movement, a theological faction prevalent across the Arab world during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which was closely associated with the works of Sayyid Rashid Rida (1865–1935).
Like Ibn Taymiyya during the 13th century; they viewed themselves as determined preachers calling to defend Tawhid (Islamic monotheism), attacking bid'ah (religious innovations), criticising the Ottoman monarchy and its clerical establishment as well as relentlessly condemning Western ideas such as nationalism.
[103][104] According to historian Itzchak Weismann: "The Salafi trend of Damascus constituted a religious response to the political alliance forged between the Ottoman State under the modernizing autocracy of Sultan Abdül Hamid II and orthodox sufi shaykhs and ulama who were willing to mobilize the masses in his support.
Rida's doctrines deeply impacted Islamist ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood such as Hasan al-Banna (d. 1949) and Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) who advocated a holistic conception of Islamic state and society; similar to the Wahhabi movement.
Salafi reformers also hailed the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya as a paragon of Sunni orthodoxy and emphasized that his strict conception of Tawhid was an important part of the doctrine of the forefathers (madhhab al-salaf).
[114] The hardening of Salafi stance was best represented by Rashid Rida's disciple Muhammad Bahjat al Bitar (1894–1976) who made robust criticisms of speculative theology, by compiling treatises that revived the creedal polemics of Ibn Taymiyya.
The early Salafiyya led by Rashid Rida was dominated by revolutionary Pan-Islamists who had socio-political goals and advocated for the restoration of an Islamic Caliphate through military struggle against European colonial powers.
[122] Academics and historians have used the term "Salafism" to denote "a school of thought which surfaced in the second half of the 19th century as a reaction to the spread of European ideas" across the Islamic World and "sought to expose the roots of modernity within Muslim civilization".
[131][132][133][134] In the modern era, some Salafis tend to take the surname "Al-Salafi" and refer to the label "Salafiyya" in various circumstances to evoke a specific understanding of Islam that is supposed to differ from that of other Sunnis in terms of 'Aqidah (creed) and approach to Fiqh (legal tradition).
Salafi activists are highly critical of the foreign policies of Western countries as well as Iran's aggressive activities in the region, such as its military intervention in Syria that backed the Alawite-dominated regime of Bashar al-Assad against Sunnis.
Sayyid Qutb's Al-Ma'alim Fi'l-tariq (The Milestones), a short tract which outlined his militant strategy of destroying Jahiliyya and replacing it with Islam, would become an influential treatise in the Salafi-Jihadi intellectual circles.
Wiktorowicz's typology has largely been discarded by recent scholarship due to its simplistic assumptions regarding religion, in addition to other limitations, such as its neglect of the changing social, political and cultural realities occurring across the Muslim World.
"[172]By making a case study of Egyptian Salafis and the "quietist" Al-Nour party, one scholar Laurence Deschamps-Laporte, demonstrates that Wiktorowicz's "non-dynamic typology" merely denotes "time-bounded pragmatic political strategies" rather than any solid identity.
On issues such as imān (faith), kufr (unbelief) and takfīr (excommunication), al-wala' wa al-bara', and of course violence and jihād, Salafis clearly do not hold the same views precisely because they read social reality, and consequently behave, so differently...
Like their paragon scholar Ibn Taymiyya, Wahhabis did not believe in blind-adherence (Taqlid) and advocated engaging with the Qur'an and Hadith through Ijtihad (legal reasoning), emphasizing simplicity in religious rituals and practices.
While the mainstream constituency believed in Islamic revival through education and welfare reforms, the militant elements of the movement advocated armed campaigns to eradicate local practices considered as innovation and demolished numerous shrines and tombs of saints (awliya).
Stéphane Lacroix, a fellow and lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris, also affirmed a distinction between the two: "As opposed to Wahhabism, Salafism refers [...] to all the hybridations that have taken place since the 1960s between the teachings of Muhammad bin 'Abd al-Wahhab and other Islamic schools of thought".
Emphasising its Egyptian heritage more robustly than Ansar al-Sunna, Da'wa Salafiyya traces its history through the persecution and imprisonment of Ibn Taymiyya in Egypt, to the trials faced by the Muwahhidun movement in Arabia and then finally to scholars like Sayyid Rashid Rida, Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, etc.
Although Salafism became a topic of discussion in media and scholarly writing in Turkish religious studies faculties, a continued lack of orthographic stability (variously, Selfye, Selefiyye, Selfyyecilik, Selefizm)" gives an indication both of the denial of its relevance to Turkey and the success of republican secularism in clearing religion from public discourse.
With the implication of Turkish citizens and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government in Syrian civil war, public discussion began to question the narrative of Salafism as a phenomenon alien to Turkey.
Salafism becomes an observable element of religious discourse in Turkey in the context of the military regime's attempt to outmanoeuvre movements emerging as a challenge to the Kemalist secular order, namely the left, Necmettin Erbakan's Islamism, Kurdish nationalism, and Iran.
[135]The second stage of Arab Salafiyya movement emerged after the First World War and was championed by the Syrian-Egyptian Islamic scholar Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1935), who called for a purist return to the Qur'an and the Sunnah.
[296] Numerous academic rebuttals of Salafism have been produced in the English language by modernists such as Khaled Abou El Fadl of the UCLA School of Law, and by Sufi intellectuals like Timothy Winter of Cambridge University and G.F.
[308] According to the French political scientist Olivier Roy, most of the third generation Western Muslim immigrants tend to adopt Salafism and some of them may break off from their family heritage, marrying other converts, rather than a bride from their country of origin, chosen by their parents.
