A Little Learning is a Dang’rous Thing.

The other day, I retweeted a relatively old tweet I had posted: the quote from Bakr Abu Zaid’s Hilyah Talib al-‘Ilm cautioning seekers of knowledge to beware of becoming Abu Shibr (literally father of a handspan). Someone replied asking me to elaborate on what the statement meant. This was my reply:

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.

Update on New Article

Just wanted to post a quick update on the article I’ve been working on for the past year and a half. I’m practically done (I think). I’m waiting on a book to be delievered (which should arrive in the coming days) that I ordered from the US; I just wanted to double check on some quotes I’ve used. I’ve also just got to write up a conclusion to wrap everything up, but aside from that, I think it’s pretty much complete. I’m planning on sending it to a few friends to look over and double check, and if everything’s ok, it’ll be published here.

With the chaos going on over in Gaza, it’s been pretty hard to find the desire to continue, let alone focus on the last little bits I need to finish. My heart aches at the devastation and carnage we’re witnessing real time over social media. Please, for those of you few who do visit here, if you aren’t already, please keep our brothers and sisters over there in your supplications. Beg Allah to have mercy on them, to protect and preserve their living, to have mercy and forgive their dead and martyred while in prostration, in the final sitting of your prayer, and if you’re able, include qunut an-nazilah in all your prayers, obligatory and voluntary.

#FreePalestine.

EDIT (Oct. 22, 2023): Book’s arrived.

New SPubs Diss Track Dropped!

New diss track from the jokers at SPubs.

Abū Taymiyyah: Ex grave-worshipper, actor, clown, ignoramus, self-promoter, deviant, student and supporter of innovators..

Full video: https://t.co/wIZU2IYrBY#salafi #ThePiousOnes #AbuTaymiyyah #AndrewTate pic.twitter.com/IBwnPwMqyg

— thepiousones (@thepiousones1) September 24, 2023

On Assim Alhakeem … .

Back in December of 2021, while perusing on Twitter (now X), I came across a tweet containing a video clip taken from Assim Alhakeem’s online fatwa show. In the clip, he essentially says that flat-chested women, or women with small breasts are abnormal and defective. The clip was taken from a longer video in which he gives a fatwa saying that breast implants and butt implants are lawful and not forbidden.

I tweeted out a short thread about it saying,

I thought, “this is just a clip. There’s gotta be more to this; some sort of context or explanation. Lemme check out the full vid.” So I check out the full video and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it ain’t much better. It’s worse.

Full disclosure: I’ve always been critical of Al Hakeem. I think he’s a charlatan and a fraud. This is just another fatwa he’s given that further cements that for me.

That he’s called a shaikh, despite his clear lack of knowledge and understanding is bad enough. That he’s conitunually given a platform and gone to by many for fatawa is completely bonkers.

A good friend of mine, Abu Tayeb, responded to one of the tweets in the thread asking me how Alhakeem was a charlatan. As I truly believe one should be able to back up any accusation they make of others, I wrote the following Twitter thread to justify what I said. I figured I’d post it up here since finding things on Twitter can be quite annoying and difficult at times.

The thread read as it was posted back in December 2021:

If You’re a Layman, Stay in Your Lane

Just a quote from the article I’ve been working on.