Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

s have disagreed with each other over who can rightfully claim the label, while some Muslims who might be categorized by others as “Salafs” have argued that Muslims should not call themselves Salaf at all: They see the term as an aberration from what their “Salafism” actually represents. Similarly, the term Wahhbism is flawed beyond repair because it would be hard to find anyone calling himself or herself “Wahhb”; this is a pejorative label that has been imposed on people by their opponents. Between these labels, scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl attempted to coin a third, Salafabism, to represent what he sees as “the Wahhabi co-optation of Salafism.”⁵ Because Salafism and Wahhbism are already somewhat hazy categories, I am not sure that pushing them together into a third artificial construct is all that helpful.

      The New York Times has been talking about Wahhbs since 1928, when it described them as “by nature a warlike people, who are constantly out for massacre and pillage in the name of Allah.” It was “in the blood of all Bedouins, and particularly the Wahabi [sic],” the article explains, “not to respect any law or order, and to rob their neighbors, and even their compatriots.”⁶ Just four years later, however, the Times reported that Wahhb rule had brought peace and stability to Arabia. The man who had been called the “Wahhabi King,” Ibn Sa’d, is praised as “the greatest Arab of all time and certainly as one of the world’s great men.” The new Wahhb state is compatible with modernity, as “the motor car has been admitted freely.” Resultant social problems, such as an influx of chauffeurs from neighboring regions, “men for the most part without breeding or moral sense,” are being addressed by the government.⁷

      In contrast, the earliest reference to Salafs as a distinct group in The New York Times appears only in 1979, after a group of armed men seized control of the Great Mosque in Mecca. The article states, “The takeover was in the name of the Salafiya [sic] movement,” adding that Saudi royals knew of the Salaf movement’s existence and that the royals belonged to a different group, the “conservative Wahabi sect in the Sunni Moslem branch.” The article characterizes Salafs by their call for a return to the ways of the Prophet and “their Moslem ancestors” and the banning of radio, television, and public employment of women. The Salafs also called for the overthrow of the Saudi government for “what they termed its deviation from Islamic tradition” and hailed their leader as the Mahd, based on apocalyptic traditions that are “not necessarily accepted by the majority of Sunni Moslems, including the Wahabis.”⁸ In its coverage of the Great Mosque standoff, the Times appears to identify the entirety of the Salaf movement as comprised of “nomads of the Otaiba tribe, who live in the desert northeast of Mecca.”⁹

      After 1979, there is not another mention of Salafs in The New York Times until 2000, in an article on links between Yemeni radicals and Osama bin Laden. The article refers to “the militant form of Salafi Islam that has inspired many militant Islamic organizations.”¹⁰ The next discussion of Salafism appears in October 2001. After that, the Salafs are referenced in at least one Times story every year, with the exception of 2008. The articles generally deal with Muslims murdering each other or Americans or threatening peace and freedom in various places. Business really picks up with the so-called Arab Spring, after which Salafs are seen as preeminent forces of chaos and danger amid the newly destabilized politics of places like Tunisia and Egypt. In Libya after the fall of Gaddafi, Muslims bulldozed a Muslim shrine. The Muslims who performed the bulldozing are widely labeled as Salaf, while the Muslim body that had been entombed at the shrine is called a f.

      On April 15, 2013, two pressure cooker bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The suspects were identified as two Chechen