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influence, nor the self-appointed voices of moderation who would marginalize Salafism by saying that it accounts for only 3 percent of Sunn
s. Salafism is not an empirically measurable quantity.
At seventeen years old, I bailed from Catholic high school to study at Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, which was named for the Saudi king who had built it as a gift for the people of Pakistan. The mosque’s educational programs similarly bore the stamp of Saudi power; perhaps it was Saudi money that paid for my plane ticket. Honestly, I don’t remember much of what I learned at Faisal Mosque, apart from a certain hegemonic Sunnism that wouldn’t have to be “Salaf” to achieve what it did for me. While I cherished the experience of life in a Muslim-majority country, I also walked the streets of Islamabad with a guiding assumption that not everything in front of me reflected “true” Islam—that most Muslims around the world had actually diluted their religious practice with culture and innovation, and that I possessed sufficient scriptural knowledge to locate their points of departure from what God had given to the Prophet.
While at Faisal Mosque, I briefly hoped to ditch my studies and join the Chechen resistance against their Russian oppressors, but my mentors talked me out of it. I could do more good for Islam as a writer, they said, reminding me that Muammad had regarded the ink of scholars as holier than the blood of martyrs. Someone back then might have called me a Salaf or a Wahhb, though this has less to do with violence (how one feels about armed struggle is not a reliable measure of Salaf- or Wahhb-ness) than my understanding of history and the claims that I was willing to make. So I went back home, carrying an encyclopedia-size collection of adth volumes on my back, and graduated from high school. At eighteen, I was living in Pittsburgh and spending nights at a mosque that I’d later learn was the city’s “hotbed of Salafism.” During my alleged Salaf years, I did hear my mentors in Pittsburgh and Pakistan emphasize the primacy of the salaf as-salih, the “pious predecessors,” but had no idea that this vocabulary might signify its speaker within a particular communal affiliation. The people around me who stressed that I needed to follow the Salaf believed that the most authentic expression of Islam—in fact the only vision of Islam with any legitimacy whatsoever, the only thing that could be called “Islam” at all—was that of the earliest Muslims. Being a Muslim meant that you committed yourself to following what the Prophet taught to his companions. If you couldn’t make that claim for yourself and stand by it, you stood outside the dn. I came to wager my religion on the unassailable integrity of Muammad’s most immediate heirs: his companions and the generation directly following them and, in turn, the generation after them. These three generations, according to reported statements of the Prophet, were the greatest human beings that this planet would ever see. After their Golden Age, humanity fell into a rapid decline and never stopped.
What I call my Salaf phase ended badly, in part because of my disillusionment with the Golden Age. Every Golden Age is imagined by people who come long after that age and is made possible only by editing, erasing, rewriting, and creatively interpreting communal memory. Many Sunn Muslims insist that belief in the Muslim community’s first four rulers after Muammad as “rightly guided caliphs” remains an inviolable article of faith. To deny this concept would disqualify one as a Sunn (and, for some Sunns, being a non-Sunn would also mean being a non-Muslim); but “rightly guided caliphs” represents a later judgment, which the men who have been assigned this title had never claimed for themselves. The title is an act of rehabilitative nostalgia, created after the point at which right guidance seemed to go south, a longing for what appears—when viewed from a distance, with vision blurred by time—to have been an era of innocence and perfect unity.
Golden Ages are sanitized imaginaries of messy realities and generally fail to survive closer scrutiny. When I started to ask the wrong questions and Islam’s sacred past became more complicated for me—that is, when I learned that my authoritative heroes fought and killed each other in civil wars—the whole edifice came crashing down. The myth of seamless unity among the earliest Muslims collapses pretty easily, and I couldn’t hold up the notion of Islam’s “greatest generations” when these people chopped up the body of Muammad’s own grandson in the desert of Karbala.
For me as a teenager, everything had been based on the collective perfection of the Salaf. The tradition was what they gave us; if we could doubt them, what was left of Islam? Losing my faith in the Salaf
