Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

Perhaps the most telling moment in the article comes when the Times describes Qadhi’s platform, the AlMaghrib Institute, as representing “an ultraconservative movement known as Salafiya,” adding that Qadhi has embarked on repackaging the institute as “orthodox with a capital O.”¹⁹ For Qadhi to find play as a fully “mainstream” Muslim leader, he had to steer his brand away from the stigma of the Salaf brand. What I’ve learned here: Despite our assumptions of what it means to be “orthodox” and “conservative,” Salafism isn’t simply “ultra-orthodox” but might ironically be the biggest heresy in town, the most problematic and marginalized affiliation available. If it has been my job description over the past decade to take seriously groups and thinkers who are almost never taken seriously, I need to look at the despised and ridiculed Salafiyya.

      As Salafs claim to represent the elite “saved sect” and argue that the majority of Muslims have gotten Islam wrong—that the legal schools and f orders and classical theologians and modern reformers and everyone else at best represent fallible human efforts, but also threaten to compromise, neglect, distort, or erase what the Prophet had given us—they actually push themselves beyond what most people might call Islamic “orthodoxy.” At least in their impossible promise, the Salafiyya rejects everything except the Qur’n and the prophetic Sunna as unacceptable innovation. When they take it this far, Salafs have to be the ultimate heretics, the rebels who reject any compromise to norms that they cannot respect. Salafism is certainly a marginalized heresy for many of the Muslim circles in which I run and the most antiestablishment vision of Islam within my reach—relative, of course, to which establishment we’re talking about, and also which variety of Salafism. When I wrote critically of Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV) and its leader, Ani Zonneveld, she blasted me with what must have struck her as an all-time unanswerable burn: “Michael Muhammad Knight . . . you are no better than the Salafis in the mosques.” Depending on whom you want to irritate, Salafism could look like the new punk rock.

      This became clear when I started writing a weekly column for VICE and took on popular Muslim voices with the argument that what they presented as timeless, universal Islam was just their personal construction, formulated within the limiting fishbowl of their own time and place. When a white convert Muslim chaplain at a university gave a Friday sermon about the “Islamic perspective” on sexuality, I offered the criticism that what he presented as a transhistorically Islamic position was entirely informed by contemporary and somewhat liberalized Western Protestant notions of heteronormative monogamous marriage. It worked for his audience, which consisted of university kids who were not likely to participate in plural marriage, let alone concubinage, and who believed that “Islam” fundamentally empowered everyone—men and women alike—as autonomous individual subjects. That’s an appealing construction of Islam for the Muslim Students’ Association of wherever this sermon was given, but it’s not the Islam, if the Islam is supposed to be consistent across time and space: It’s not an “Islamic sexuality” that people could have understood fourteen hundred years ago. My commentary on the sermon, after I sat back and read it a few times, seemed to operate on a kind of Salaf logic: I had basically argued that the sermon made a conflation of personal opinion with Islam and could not scripturally defend itself with our agreed-upon “authentic sources.”

      Conservatives can dismiss progressives as producing an Islam defined by “Western” values, but they often play by the same rules. There’s a particular kind of male convert that I have in mind here, a man who fails to recognize misogyny as a deeply embedded American norm. Growing up in American patriarchy, he ingests old-fashioned American heterosexism and male privilege, later becomes Muslim, and then projects his culturally learned American antifeminism onto his newfound religious identity. Pretending that he has transcended American culture (a culture that he strangely perceives as having been overrun with radical feminists and queers who impose their hegemony on everyone), he claims to defend the Timeless Tradition of the Brown World against those who wish to dilute it with secular Western theories and methods. He picks up enough of those theories and methods and critical vocabularies to deconstruct his opponents’ assumptions of universal truth and the flows of power that produce them but never turns that weapon upon his own prejudices and assumptions. As his principled heterosexism names the points at which Islam’s integrity is most threatened, he rewrites American patriarchy in Timeless Tradition’s vocabulary and presents it as counterculture, a resistance against Euro-American global domination. You can either care about fighting gender inequality and homophobia, he says, or you can value the preservation of Islam against Western knowledge regimes. He condemns the colonization of Islam by Western neoliberals but has no fear of the same work by Western neotraditionalists, and he ironically uses anticolonial arguments to silence the voices of brown women. It’s not me, he swears, it’s just what the Tradition says. For his big finishing move, he justifies an arrogant and authoritarian view of the Tradition by reminding you how meek and humble its great scholars were. Watch out for these boys. They were sexists and homophobes before they ever heard of the Prophet.

      Writing on popular shaykh (and another white convert) Hamza Yusuf, I discussed Yusuf’s articulation of “classical Islamic tradition” as part of his carefully sculpted brand. What Yusuf offered, my piece suggested, was not reducible to “classical” or “traditional” Islam, but represented Yusuf’s own scholarly imagination. I might have been issuing these critiques from my own position as pro-queer, pro-heresy, Sh’ Nimatullahi Five Percenter consumer of hallucinogens, but my articles still challenged so-called mainstream Sunn leaders on their own attempts to speak for the pure and real. Deconstruction had become my fundamentalism.

      The move of Salaf deconstruction is unstoppable, because once you realize the critical problems of reading texts and reproducing the past and all that, then you surrender any hope for retrieving a “true” Islam that’s based objectively on “what the book says.” You no longer get to dismiss your rivals with the naive critique “That’s not religion, it’s culture,” because you can’t claim to have stepped out of “culture” yourself. A deconstructive read of the Salaf does not throw us into a fantasmic Golden Age of unblemished hegemony and absolute coherence