Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

s, members of Sunn Islam’s “most radical sect.” To provide some context, the writer states that “Salafi warriors swept across the Arabian Peninsula nearly a century ago, wreaking havoc in the name of the king of the new nation of Saudi Arab [sic].” The column’s author, David A. Andelman, explains that Salafism is the “radical ideology” espoused by Al-Qaeda and “violent Chechen revolutionaries,” whom he describes as “Salafis to the core.”¹¹

      The Chechen freedom struggle is old, but this alleged Salaf core is new. Traditionally, fighters for Chechen independence were counted among the Muslims called fs. Sometime after the early 1990s, the resistance was taken over by Muslims who were called Salafs and/or Wahhbs. Then the Moscow-backed Chechen government took to promoting a revival of what it called fism, apparently viewing fism as the antidote to any potential for Islamically driven rebellion against the state. The government’s prevailing assumptions seem to be that Salafism makes people angry and violent while fism makes them happy and sleepy. fism is perceived as opium for the masses in the classical Marxist sense, whereas Salafism is crystal meth.

      The United States government has also constructed Salafism and Wahhbism as actual things (often interchangeable) and security threats. When “War on Terror” rhetoric needs to avoid making a blanket generalization about all Muslims, it simply generalizes against the subcategory of Salafs/Wahhbs.¹² In discourse pitting reformed “good” Muslims against extremist “bad” Muslims, terms like Salaf and Wahhb serve to mark the bad ones. Salafism has been paradoxically marked as both the Islam of radical uprisings against states and the Islam of state-supported “Allh says to obey your rulers” quietism, with its goals described as both actively waging conflict against the enemies of Islam and withdrawing from politics to purify Muslim beliefs and practices. For many Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Salaf or Wahhb can describe any expression of Sunnism that seems archaic, legally and ritually rigid, scripturally literalist, ultraconservative on gender issues, intolerant of the diversity of beliefs and practices within Muslim communities, and the usual suspects whenever something blows up. Even for Muslims who can look past the irresponsible reportage that tags all Salafs as would-be terrorists, the Salafiyya are often condemned as the villains in a global “war for the soul of Islam,” in which the fate of not only Muslims but also the “free world,” “Western civilization,” etc. hangs in the balance. From this perspective, there’s no reason to look closer at the Salafs or try to examine their ideas, because clearly they’re just antirational, antimodern, antihuman fundamentalists who don’t deserve the time of day from us. Do they even have ideas to be examined?

      BORDER PATROLS

      Looking back on Islam as I had understood it way, way before my chemical turn, I remember concepts and attitudes for which I now consider my teen years to have been my “Salaf phase.” This is somewhat a projection of my current awareness onto my past. In Blue-Eyed Devil, I discuss my youthful “Salafi fear of masturbating” and refusal to look at girls in my “Wahhab days,” but there was nothing distinctly Salaf or Wahhb about it. Thinking of my past as “Salaf,” my grown-man self decides the categories into which my teen self