Salafism Revisited: Some of You Lot Still Don’t Get It

[Update: Found a number of typos and missing symbols I missed the first few times going through the article. I’ve corrected them and uploaded an updated PDF. Because of the way WordPress’s media library works, the URL for the PDF has changed. If you have a direct link to it bookmarked, you’re going to have to update it. Apologies.]

Well, it’s taken me a while to get this done—just a little over two years, to be exact. This one’s a bit of a doozy too at 31 pages (32 if you include the cover), over double the length of its predecessor, Salafism, Do You Really Get It? An Actual Methodology or Merely Empty Slogans? As was the case when I first published Salafism, Do You Really Get It? in 2009, I’m not quite sure how this article (or book as my wife and daughter jokingly call it) will be received. About a decade and a half has gone by since the first installment, a heck of a lot has gone on since then. Sadly, however, a lot of things still remain the same, albeit with a different cast of actors and strangely, on a much larger stage (a lot of what was witnessed and experienced mainly among Salafis in the late 1990s and early 2000s is now being seen throughout Western culture, both Muslim and non-Muslim, e.g., extreme partisanship and division, outrage culture, cancel culture, etc.). As the old adage goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

They Mention Some, But Not the Rest

Here’s another look at the intellectual and academic dishonesty committed by the exaggerators from among those who attribute themselves to Salafism, They Mention Some, But Not the Rest: Yet Another Example of Academic Dishonesty From the Self-Appointed Vanguards of Salafism. From the article:

In his Iqtidâ’ as–Sirât al-Mustaqîm, Shaikh of Islam Ibn Taimiyyah, may Allah have mercy on him, relates that “’Abdur-Rahman bin Mahdî and others said [that] the people of knowledge write what is for them and what is against them, while the people of desires do not write except what is for them.”

Despite the fact that these people go on about the gravity of hiding knowledge and information from the public, looking at their behaviour, we find innumerable examples that give credence to what Shaikh of Islam, may Allah have mercy on him, mentions. I wrote about one such example recently in an article I titled, Making Moosaa’s Mountain Out Of Bilal’s Molehill, in which I pointed out the intellectual and academic dishonesty displayed by Moosaa Richardson in his criticism of a supposedly “dangerous mistake” he accused Dr. Bilal Philips of making in one of his published books.

The other week, I came across yet another example of academic dishonesty, which these people continually display time and time again. This time, the example comes from a salafitalk.net poster who posted a couple of links to the sahab.net Arabic discussion forum. The poster simply posts the links and provides a brief description before each, both in Arabic and in English; the first: “The support of ash-Shaykh Muhammad Bazmool for the critique of his brother ash-Shaykh Ahmad on Ali al-Halabee,” and the second: “Ash-Shaykh Muhammad Bazmool: The Refutations of ash-Shaykh Ahmad Bazmool denotes that al-Halabi has deviated from the Manhaj of the Salaf.” Now, given the fact that many of salafitalk.net’s readers are English speakers who don’t know much Arabic—if any at all—there’s a good chance that none of them will actually come to know what’s contained in the two links. Despite that, the poster doesn’t provide his audience with a translation, summarized or otherwise, of what’s mentioned in the two posts. The result, of course, is that the readers are left with the obvious impression he and the previous posters to the thread (e.g., Maaz Qureshi or whoever it is posting under the name “SunnahPublishing.Net”) wishes their audience to get: ‘Alî al-Halabî is a deviant who has strayed from the Salafî methodology and should be avoided like the plague.

Read on … They Mention Some, But Not the Rest: Yet Another Example of Academic Dishonesty From the Self-Appointed Vanguards of Salafism.