Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

n and reforming Muslim practice. When Amina Wadud shocked the world with her intergender Friday prayer service, I was there. One of the prayer’s organizers, journalist Asra Nomani, had even named my novel The Taqwacores, which had depicted a woman leading men in prayer, as an inspiration for the event.¹⁶ Within the progressive scene, which many Muslims would describe as a heretical movement in its own right, I encountered a Muslim forum in which I could speak openly and honestly about my inner conditions without fear of judgment or exile. Though the label progressive, like Salaf, covered a wide ground and signified a diverse range of priorities, I could find people in the progressive scene who did not define their community by shared faith convictions; for them, a Muslim was anyone who called herself or himself a Muslim, regardless of what the term Muslim meant to that individual. This allowed space not only for Sunns, Sh’s, and members of other communities to come together, but also for believing Muslims to accept their brother/sisterhood with “cultural” or “secular” Muslims who did not necessarily believe in Islam’s supernatural components, but still maintained an attachment to their Muslim heritage. In this hodge-podge of Muslims who felt like exiles for any number of reasons, the singular shared value was acceptance.

      The terrains of my pro-heresy Islam, like those of the “orthodoxy” against which it defined itself, were always shifting. Inhabiting a borderless, deconstructed Islam that could never demand its own reconstruction, I made no claim of consistency in my sources or methods beyond a romance of the marginal. Each of these movements and figures contributed ingredients toward my own sense of what it meant to be Muslim, even when they opposed and contradicted each other. Unfortunately for my personal project, these contributors to my borderless, pro-heresy Islam were just as eager as the powers of “orthodoxy” to impose their own limits and push people out. To some Five Percenters, I remained too much of an “orthodox” Muslim to qualify for full membership; to others, my advocacy of a queer-positive Islam violated boundaries that they regarded as nonnegotiable. Meanwhile, the progressive Muslim scene as I experienced it was fairly bourgeois, frequently blind to issues of race and class, and not much interested in what groups like the Five Percenters had to say. I loved the sum of people who were tagged as heretics in part because they were tagged as heretics, but this did not mean that they could harmoniously merge together into a coherent countermonolith. The only thing that my teachers shared in common, at least as I engaged them, was resistance to an overwhelming matrix of “orthodox” Sunn hegemony. By mocking and negating that power, they changed the rules of what was thinkable to me as “Islamic” and what kinds of possibilities awaited me outside the bounds of popular Muslim recognition. They provided me with new spaces to claim my own self as a righteous Muslim self. Perhaps all that I really wanted was a queering of Sunnism.

      This borderless Islam could not have existed without borders of its own. I had defined it purely in opposition to its ultimate Other, which was represented best by what I naively tagged in terms of nation-states (“Saudi Islam”) or ethnocentrism (“Arab Islam”). Progressive Muslims, Sh’s and fs of various strands, Five Percenters, and taqwacore kids might have had nothing in common beyond a mutual distaste for Salafism: They could share only in an artificial unity that Salafism imposed on them from outside. But if I sought value from every corner of our vast tradition, why couldn’t I approach the Salafiyya? Did they have nothing to say? Did they expose the limits of my own happy Muslim pluralism?

      The consequence of my pro-heresy Islam, in which I theoretically accepted all kinds of competing interpretations and communities as equally “Islamic,” was that none of them could have what they claimed for themselves. Each marginalized community had to share space with every other marginalized community. Because many of these discourses did in fact make exclusivist and authoritarian claims, embracing all visions of Islam ironically meant that I denied them. What if, instead of making my own mutant blend with ingredients from everyone, I just discarded all accumulated interpretation and drilled straight into the core? This is where the Salaf project, even if that project is doomed before it starts, pulls me in.

      I’d love to find my own Salafism, but this isn’t simply a radical turn away from the pro-heresy model, at least not in the way that you might expect. Just remember that the terms orthodoxy and heresy fail to meaningfully signify anything beyond the relations of power between competing groups, and consider the 2011 Boston Globe article on white convert imm Suhaib Webb. Journalist Omar Sacirbey (the same writer, by the way, who first broke “Muslim punk rock” as a national story and thus opened the floodgates for several years of awful media mythmaking) mentions the Salafiyya in passing as a tag of blame, a dangerous charge that has been hurled at Webb by his opponents. A critic accused Webb of affiliation with the “hardline Salaf sect of Islam”; Webb, in response, “denied being a Salaf disciple and said he follows the Maliki Islamic school.”¹⁷ Without any examination of what it means to follow one or the other, the article leads us to assume that Malikis must be better than Salafs, and then clears Webb’s name of links to the undesirable latter. The New York Times gives a similar treatment to Yasir Qadhi, emphasizing that he sparked controversy among Salafs for adopting a “more moderate message” while adding that he shows respect for f