Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

Why I Am a Salafi

of globalized “traditional” Sunn knowledge production (which, incidentally, was founded by Ism’ls). Perhaps ditching high school for a brief study hermitage in South Asia (popularly viewed as lacking the authenticity cred of the Middle East), only to end up at extremes of the inauthentic—the black gods, punk rock kids, feminist imms, and drinkers of psychoactive brews—I became an ugly failed shadow of the shining white-boy-shaykh archetype.²¹

There are tensions in my Islam that have haunted me through much of the two decades that I have been making and remaking myself as a Muslim; I want to call them Salaf tensions. As a teenager calling myself a “revert,” I might have been a Salaf. But when I called myself an ex-Muslim or pro-heresy Muslim or simply a bad Muslim, it was also as a Salaf, because my estrangement from Islam and pushback against whatever I imagined as normative was only a response to my Salafism. Reading my past work, I can find myself reacting to “orthodox Islam” and treating it as a unit of analysis as though orthodoxy is actually a thing that exists in the world. Whether I tagged myself as believer or apostate or heretic, Salafism decided the rules and named these positions. If I am not a Salaf, I was still made by Salafs. Whether or not I should be counted among the Salafiyya, I am growing to appreciate that the Salafiyya will always be part of me, even after all my wackadoo mischief.

With bismillh and a word of thanks to the dimethyltryptamine, here we go.

RETURN TO PAMPHLET ISLAM

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful. — Nadine Gordimer¹

THE TRUTH STANDS clear from error, the Qur’n tells me, and one of the dominant themes of what I called “Islam” in my teen years was Islam’s awesome clarity: The message presented itself as so simple that it could fit inside a pamphlet with large font and bullet points. For me to reconsider my teen Salafism, I’d have to reconsider what Omid Safi has called “pamphlet Islam”: an Islam forged in the “serious intellectual and spiritual fallacy of thinking that complex issues can be handled in four or six glossy pages.”² These expressions of “pamphlet Islam,” readily available at almost any Islamic center, bear titles such as “The Status of Women in Islam” or “The Islamic Position on Jesus”³ and thus rely on the assumptions that (1) there is such a possibility as a definitive “Islamic position” on anything, and (2) the author has the “Islamic position” on an issue nailed down firmly under his/her control, with no room for it to move.

The term fundamentalist as popularly used in conversations about religion was inspired by Christian pamphlets. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles disseminated its pamphlet series, The Fundamentals, with the intention to “provide intellectually sound, popularly accessible defense of the Christian faith.”⁴ In this context, to be a fundamentalist wasn’t a bad thing: It meant that one upheld Christianity’s “fundamentals” in the face of Darwinism, modern literary theories and biblical criticism, and liberalized churches that denied the Bible’s literal inerrancy. The Fundamentals sought to prove in pamphlets’ limited space that the Bible represented historically and scientifically unassailable fact, that it was only through loyalty to the Bible’s literal truth that one could ground an unchanging Christianity against the unstable modern world.

Safi argues that we can and must do better than “pamphlet Islam,” and I agree, but I’m also afraid that our efforts might only produce bigger pamphlets. Progressive Muslim reformism, with all its performance of theoretical sophistication, sometimes makes for its own counterpamphlet that’s no less simplistic. Anyway, a certain brand of pamphlet Islam is where I come from. Once I entered into a Muslim community, pamphlets became maps to show me the straight path. I also left Islam through the pamphlets; in the period that I considered myself an ex-Muslim, it was because the pamphlets’ easy answers and imaginary hegemonies couldn’t hold up to the complexities of being a Muslim in my real life. The pamphlets are meant to be read once and passed along; their arguments disintegrate if you spend too much time with them.

But there had to be a time when it was really that simple, right? Wouldn’t a “pamphlet Islam” be closer to the original Islam, the Islam of our Prophet? The stuff that can’t fit into a pamphlet amounts to later elaboration and refinement, which, if I’m trying to recover my Salafism, is unnecessary. Safi critiques the popular catchphrase that Islam’s truth lies in its simplicity, but if I imagine what Islam would look like in the presence of the Prophet, an Islam in which people did not theorize on questions of authority and interpretation, it had to be simple. Perhaps in Muammad’s lifetime, if you upheld him as center, you could really start a sentence with, “Islam says _______________.” To deny Islam its supposed simplicity is to admit the hard truth that we are functionally a prophetless community, that we have no organic center. The pamphlets aim to assure us that Muammad’s absence changes nothing.

At a Muslim Students’ Association “Islam 101” event intended to teach non-Muslim students about Islam, I sat and listened to a woman

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