Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

roughly two decades earlier: Real Islam cannot be violent, because the Arabic word islm shares its root letters with another word, salm, that means “peace”; Muslims love and honor Jesus as a virgin-born prophet of God; Islam respects women and gave them unprecedented rights; Muslims made great contributions to science while Europe was lost in the Dark Ages. Even in my post-ayahuasca love for my sisters and brothers, I felt a temptation to challenge her: When she quoted the Qur’n as stating that Mary guarded her “chastity” and Allh breathed into her, I wanted to point out that in Arabic, the word that she read as chastity—farj—more precisely signified genitalia. This matters because in 66:12, Aanat farjah fanafakhn fh min rin can read not only as “She guarded her chastity so we breathed into her from our spirit,” but also “She guarded her vagina so we breathed into it from our spirit,” and no one wants to think about Allh or Gabriel breathing into Mary’s vagina (some translations, drawing from an uneasy interpretive tradition, suggest in their parenthetical notes that Allh breathed into the sleeve of Mary’s garment).⁵ I let this and some other questions go unasked. At the end of her talk, she left a stack of pamphlets on a table. I picked one up: A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam, by I. A. Ibrahim. Its first edition was published in 1996, within a few years of my conversion. At a total of roughly seventy-five pages, maybe it’s too big to be called a pamphlet, but it still reads like pamphlet-grade discourse. The cover shows Earth in space, with an open copy of the Qur’n at the far end of a light beam that meets Earth in the Indian Ocean, several hundred miles from the coast of South Africa, as if to represent the Qur’n blasting off from the Indian Ocean into space. The Earth and extraterrestrial Qur’n appear above the Masjid Haram in Mecca, illuminated at night and crowded with white-garbed worshipers, and the surrounding cityscape. It appears as though an alternate Earth looms over Mecca in the night sky, and that this alternate Earth produces a giant Qur’n somewhere in the southern region of its Indian Ocean, and that this Qur’n leaves the alternate Earth to descend upon the Ka’ba of our own planet. Giving these details much more attention than could have been intended, I briefly wanted a world in which this was really how things worked.

      So I considered A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam as a pamphlet to start me back at the basics, a boiling down of Islam to its crucial points. This is Islam at its most simple: the sectless, undifferentiated Islam, as pure and clean as it has always been. If that is the mission, A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam cannot confess to representing any particular Muslim orientation, since to do so would confess that a variety of Muslim orientations exist. There are no mentions of terms like Sunn or Sh’, let alone more specific designations such as Salaf, and at no point does the pamphlet acknowledge that Muslims have ever disagreed with each other on anything. Pamphlet Islam can never say that it doesn’t have an answer, or that we could choose from multiple answers, or that the singular correct answer might take more than a paragraph.

      This is why, even if I consider the pamphlet a Salaf product, I can’t call the woman who provided it a Salaf; she wouldn’t have to be a self-identified Salaf to accept the pamphlet as genuinely “Islamic.” The pamphlet reveals its Salaf genealogy only through its publisher (the Houston branch of Saudi-based Dar-us-Salam Publications), suggestions for further readings (including the work of Salaf scholar Bilal Philips and the Hilali-Khan translation of the Qur’n), and directory of Muslim organizations, including groups such as the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). An ideology is most successful when it’s no longer recognizable as an ideology but accepted simply as “common sense”; religious sectarianism is best branded as the denial of sectarianism, when it no longer appears to represent one interpretation against others but simply the religion as it is. At that point, your rivals don’t exist. What might be called “Salaf” concepts, successfully packaged as generic and universal Islam, can spread even among people who find Salafism ridiculous.

      The sixty-three pages of the pamphlet’s content is divided into three chapters: “Some Evidence for the Truth of Islam,” “Some Benefits of Islam,” and “General Information on Islam.” The “Evidence” chapter takes up the first thirty-five pages, leaving just four pages for “Benefits” and twenty-four for “General Information.” The “Evidence” chapter tells me that the Qur’n expresses a harmony with modern science, which “proves without doubt” that the Qur’n is divinely revealed. Foremost is the Qur’n’s discussion of what happens in the womb. The Qur’n’s treatment of embryonic development (which actually conforms to the stages articulated in ancient Greek medical science⁶) is presented as advanced beyond anything that human knowledge could have attained prior to modern microscopes. The Qur’