Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

ibukum are rendered almost invisible as individuals. Names of figures whom later history records as important, such as Ab Bakr or ’Al, are absent from the verses. The Qur’n does not give us the names of Muammad’s parents or wives or biological children. The only people from his lifetime to be mentioned by name in the Qur’n are Zayd, identified in tradition as Muammad’s adopted son Zayd ibn Haritha (33:37), and a figure called Ab Lahab, “Father of Flames” (111:1), presumed by interpretive tradition to have been Muammad’s despised uncle. But the Qur’n does make reference to people who took part in the first Muslim community, such as the mention in 80:1–2 of an unidentified blind man who went to see Muammad. Tradition outside the Qur’n names him as Ibn Umm Maktum, and an incident from his life is now part of the divine revelation.

      In one episode, the scribe to whom Muammad was reciting a verse excitedly remarked, “Blessed be Allh, the best of creators.” Muammad then told the scribe that “Blessed be Allh, the best of creators” actually belonged in that verse, at the exact point at which the scribe said it. The scribe’s outburst can be found at the end of 23:14.¹⁴ Incorporating stories of the early community into my Qur’n, I lose my sense of the Qur’n as a singular text that preexisted the created universe, awaiting its delivery to one man in installments. Instead, the Qur’n looks like a trace of a specific community’s encounter with divine power—a power whose spontaneous bursts, localized at the site of one man’s body, appeared as an ongoing exchange with that community. Maybe this view compromises the dominant Sunn theological position regarding the Qur’n, namely that it is uncreated and preexisted the world.

      In an idealized Salaf method of reading, we would not prioritize our own eyes over those of the Qur’n’s original audience. Instead of attempting to decipher a verse for ourselves, which leaves the Qur’n vulnerable to our prejudices, assumptions, and desires, we instead ask what the Prophet had said to his Companions about that verse, or what the Companions related to the Followers. The Companions do appear in traditional sources as Qur’n interpreters. adth reports portray ‘’isha as an authoritative teacher of the Qur’n who intervened in debates on the text’s meaning.¹⁵ Ibn ‘Abbs, the Prophet’s paternal cousin (and ancestor of the ‘Abbsids), is treated as a foundational figure in the field of exegesis, and tradition represents Muammad as praying