as so often imagined but potentially
postmodern, shutting down empty promises of essences and universals, giving cynical smirks to the supposed light of human reason, and revealing all opponents to be squarely situated within the specific contexts and modern regimes of sense that made them possible.
The problem, then, wouldn’t be that I’m too permissive with my religion, or too confident in bending and twisting the texts to make them say exactly what I want them to say. It’s that they are—the superstar imms and shaykhs and scholars who feed their communities an easily digestible product that they call “Islam” because neither they nor their communities want anything too complicated. Despite all their big talk about preserving or reviving “tradition,” they must also take liberties with it.
Five Percenter lessons ask the question, “To make devil, what must one first do?” The lessons’ answer: “To make devil, one must begin grafting from the original.” For Salafism as I read it, everything is grafted, diluted, and corrupt. Every method is doomed. There’s something potentially liberatory in the assertion that Islam as we have received it, an Islam that has taken centuries of elaboration and systematization and generations of brilliant minds to develop, represents a pollution of the pure. The great schools and methodologies offer the helpful work of humans, but if we had to, we could survive without them. A foundational intellect like al-Ghazl was not the Prophet Muammad, nor was he a companion of the Prophet or someone who had known a companion; he lived centuries too late to even know someone who had known someone who had known a companion. Al-Ghazl represents the “essence” of Islam only if we regard Islam as something that starts post-Ghazl. Ripping away the elaborations, Salafism stands to unsettle communities, which can be alternately dangerous or useful. A theoretically savvy Salafiyya—if ingesting modern critical theory didn’t betray the whole point of being Salaf—could subvert the dominant narratives, tear down established norms, turn power relations upside down, and open up new possibilities. The Five Percenters had me asserting full agency over the text, creating its meaning for myself: Salafism has me doing away with interpretation, which could lead not to simple “literalism” or “fundamentalism” but to another agency altogether.
The Salafiyya look to the pristine origins as a means of anchoring and centering Islam, but what if I get the opposite result? Every interpretation, subject to the limits of interpretation, risks promoting the inauthentic. But inauthentic compared to what? When I call out others for their problematic readings, is it because I still cling to this idea that a greater authenticity awaits us out there? Where is this perfect Islam against which I measure all imperfect simulations? Without faith in the way of the Salaf as a reachable finish line, my Salafism trolls everyone, becoming the big No to all claims of apprehending the truth of the Qur’n or the earliest Muslims; but this Salaf No comes with a price. My Salafism diagnoses the problem but gives no cure, because Salafism cannot survive its own critique. There’s more than one way to bulldoze a shrine. If everything is bida’, this includes the Salafiyya themselves, along with the premodern heroes whom they glorify as defenders of the real. Though I’d love to return to the origins of my tradition and dig up the uncorrupted Islam of the Salaf, I have to ask whether this is even possible, which means facing the consequences when such a project falls apart and I end up with nothing. Whether we denounce the tradition’s diversity or speak of Islam in the plural and accept all “Islams” as equally valid, we sacrifice the potential for an absolute, pure-in-itself Islam.
“Straight to the sources,” everyone says, even anti-Salafs who produce their own ironic mirrors of Salafism. What are these sources, and how does one return “straight” to them? Can a Qur’n website—offering multiple translations, a searchable concordance of Arabic roots, annotations of every verse with displays of the Arabic grammar, syntax, and morphology, and audio recordings of recitation—reproduce the original Islam of fifteen centuries ago? Or perhaps the original Islam awaits me in online archives of Salaf articles in PDF format? I am not sitting at the feet of a scholar to experience traditional transmission of knowledge, but some Salafs would scroll through pristine Tradition with a cursor in the shape of a white-gloved cartoon hand.
Operating instead as a tool of alienation and negation, Salafism can perform the same destabilizing work as my pro-heresy pluralism; Salafism threatens to erase every Muslim imaginary, including mine, and then its own. If we issue Salaf critiques but confess to mediation as an inescapable fact of our lives as readers, Salafism then becomes as empty a signifier as Islam itself. In its power to deny every truth claim, Salafism ironically denies its own privilege to name the rules.
While engaging the modern phenomenon of Salafism does not instantly bring me face-to-face with the Prophet and his generation, it at least returns me to my origins, recovering the history that shaped me as a particular kind of Muslim. I didn’t simply convert to Islam, but rather the version of Islam that could come together from the books, pamphlets, and lecture tapes that people threw at me in the 1990s. I didn’t just go to Pakistan, but a particular version of Pakistan, imagined and produced by the people and institutions who brought me there and walked me through it.
These white convert dudes who end up as figures in the public personality game tend to authorize themselves through overseas travel. Hamza Yusuf found his cred in the North African desert, coming home with a white-man Orientalist narrative of having learned at the feet of what he calls “living fossils” who exist “almost halfway in the dream world,” custodians of a capitalized
