helpless, unable to offer a defense. My past cannot speak, so my present speaks for it. Anyway, at the time that I might have been a Salaf
or Wahh
b
, I did not know these terms. For me, it was just Islam.
I had become Muslim during the first half of the 1990s, a time in which the resurgent legacy of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam—revived through Spike Lee’s Malcolm biopic, Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March, and a flood of politically engaged hip-hop following the Reagan era’s destruction of America’s inner cities—intersected with Saudi-sponsored propagation efforts and flourishing Salaf hubs in the major urban centers of the northeast. My Islam was an effect of that collision. I converted after reading Malcolm X’s Autobiography and literature that traveled through Saudi networks, such as Hammudah Abd al-Ati’s Islam in Focus. It was in the Malcolm mythology that I first tasted the pursuit of religious truth as a quest for lost origins: Malcolm found himself as a Muslim in part through exposing Christian tradition as a willful distortion and manipulation of Christ’s true teachings and his real identity. In the second of Malcolm’s two Muslim conversions, he rediscovered his humanity by abandoning the Nation and jumping into the center of what he regarded as Islamic universalism. Islam in Focus gave me a concretized, bullet-pointed Islam of bodily disciplines, appeals to rationalism, and blueprints for an ideal society that resonated in complete harmony with the Islam that I had read in Malcolm. Incidentally, Islam in Focus was also the book that inspired the conversion of prominent American imm Zaid Shakir.13
The first time that I read the Qur’n, it was a Saudi-networked reprint of Yusuf Ali’s translation, in which editors had purged Ali’s extensive commentary of ideas that they found unacceptable. From there I moved to the seminal Qur’nic commentary of Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue who was hung by the Egyptian government one year after Malcolm’s assassination. Somewhere in my readings or initial encounters with Muslims, I learned to avoid self-identification as a “convert,” preferring to call myself a “revert”; I had not changed to something new, but had reverted to my original self. Islam had been my condition in the womb, my natural state prior to the interference of culture.
Ideas and practices can dig tunnels under the borders, and not every Sunn who expresses a Salaf-influenced thought would necessarily identify that thought (or herself/himself) as “Salaf.” I would never impose the Salaf label on the mosque at which I formally converted (the Islamic Center of Rochester, New York) or its leadership, but through my experience there, I encountered claims and attitudes that appear in Salaf flows of communication. The imm who witnessed my conversion and became my dearly loved mentor was criticized by some as more philosopher than imm, but he had also been a student of Ism’l al-Farq (1921–1986), a tremendously important scholar who often gets tagged as “Salaf” and/or “Wahhb.” I came to regard al-Farq as part of my Muslim genealogy but had no awareness of the intellectual currents that produced him. Because the books and pamphlets that fell into my hands did not clearly mark themselves as Salaf, and the well-intentioned mosque uncles who shared stories and advice with this young revert did not present their own views as Salaf, it can sometimes become hard to say where Salafism begins and ends, or whether Salafism is even a useful term to explain anything. This is not to play into a particular Islamophobia, specifically a Salafophobia, in which Salaf and/or Wahhb Muslims are portrayed as a sinister fifth column that has clandestinely injected its poison into American Muslim communities. I am not interested in the conspiracy theorists who claim that 80 percent of US mosques have fallen under Wahh
