Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight
alt=""/>n and reforming Muslim practice. When Amina Wadud shocked the world with her intergender Friday prayer service, I was there. One of the prayer’s organizers, journalist Asra Nomani, had even named my novel The Taqwacores, which had depicted a woman leading men in prayer, as an inspiration for the event.16 Within the progressive scene, which many Muslims would describe as a heretical movement in its own right, I encountered a Muslim forum in which I could speak openly and honestly about my inner conditions without fear of judgment or exile. Though the label progressive, like Salaf, covered a wide ground and signified a diverse range of priorities, I could find people in the progressive scene who did not define their community by shared faith convictions; for them, a Muslim was anyone who called herself or himself a Muslim, regardless of what the term Muslim meant to that individual. This allowed space not only for Sunn
The terrains of my pro-heresy Islam, like those of the “orthodoxy” against which it defined itself, were always shifting. Inhabiting a borderless, deconstructed Islam that could never demand its own reconstruction, I made no claim of consistency in my sources or methods beyond a romance of the marginal. Each of these movements and figures contributed ingredients toward my own sense of what it meant to be Muslim, even when they opposed and contradicted each other. Unfortunately for my personal project, these contributors to my borderless, pro-heresy Islam were just as eager as the powers of “orthodoxy” to impose their own limits and push people out. To some Five Percenters, I remained too much of an “orthodox” Muslim to qualify for full membership; to others, my advocacy of a queer-positive Islam violated boundaries that they regarded as nonnegotiable. Meanwhile, the progressive Muslim scene as I experienced it was fairly bourgeois, frequently blind to issues of race and class, and not much interested in what groups like the Five Percenters had to say. I loved the sum of people who were tagged as heretics in part because they were tagged as heretics, but this did not mean that they could harmoniously merge together into a coherent countermonolith. The only thing that my teachers shared in common, at least as I engaged them, was resistance to an overwhelming matrix of “orthodox” Sunn
This borderless Islam could not have existed without borders of its own. I had defined it purely in opposition to its ultimate Other, which was represented best by what I naively tagged in terms of nation-states (“Saudi Islam”) or ethnocentrism (“Arab Islam”). Progressive Muslims, Sh
The consequence of my pro-heresy Islam, in which I theoretically accepted all kinds of competing interpretations and communities as equally “Islamic,” was that none of them could have what they claimed for themselves. Each marginalized community had to share space with every other marginalized community. Because many of these discourses did in fact make exclusivist and authoritarian claims, embracing all visions of Islam ironically meant that I denied them. What if, instead of making my own mutant blend with ingredients from everyone, I just discarded all accumulated interpretation and drilled straight into the core? This is where the Salaf
I’d love to find my own Salafism, but this isn’t simply a radical turn away from the pro-heresy model, at least not in the way that you might expect. Just remember that the terms orthodoxy and heresy fail to meaningfully signify anything beyond the relations of power between competing groups, and consider the 2011 Boston Globe article on white convert im