Читать книгу Why I Am a Salafi - Michael Muhammad Knight - Страница 7
ОглавлениеWhat are you doing after the orgy? — Jean Baudrillard1
I WAS ON THE edge of the desert when the drugs wore off, good-bye Muslim Gonzo. After several hours of dimethyltryptamine-powered inward pilgrimage, the crazy was gone by sunrise. The Mother Wheel had beamed me up screaming, but the beaming back to Earth came slow and easy, leaving me in happy dumb peace. Eyad and I rolled up our sleeping bags, shared good-byes with the people who had provided the medicine, and drove off their land, back to Los Angeles.
The medicine was ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea from the Amazon that had found its way into white New Age scenes and spiritual therapy culture. Ayahuasca’s main ingredients consisted of a sacred vine that opened my body up to the dimethyltryptamine, and another plant that provided the dimethyltryptamine itself. Many Muslims would insist that drinking ayahuasca is not Islamically permissible, that its physical effects amount to either a state of prohibited intoxication or something like black magic. The concern from my sisters and brothers is reasonable: In ayahuasca world, the sublime devotions came with unspeakable transgressions that simultaneously denied and affirmed the words on Allh’s pages. Whether this pushed me out of Islam or drilled me straight into its deepest guts, I can’t say, but that is an old problem of mystical experience.
Whether all or arm, I couldn’t have experienced ayahuasca as anything other than a Muslim, embarking on an entirely Muslim trip. The chemical purging and healing found their expression through the symbolic language of Islam, or at least an archive of stories and reference points in my brain that I have catalogued as “Islam.” In the car I told Eyad about some of the visions, not sure how it might strike his own Muslim sensibilities or if it was even the kind of thing that I should share with others. Within Islamic tradition, sages have often advised that we lock this kind of experience in our hearts, as the disclosure could harm our communities or even ourselves. I didn’t mention every detail of the trip to Eyad; some of the visions were so far off the map that I needed time alone with them first, if only to ask what in my head could have made those visions possible.
It would have to come out sooner or later, because writing is my religion as much as anything. The full story went into Tripping with Allah, my Great American Muslim Drug Adventure. After the book came out, the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences described my ayahuasca vision as a “frankly disturbing blending of erotic and religious imagery.”2 This pretty much fits.
Reclining the passenger seat all the way back, carried by Eyad’s machine back to civilization, I not only felt gratitude for what had transpired (whether it had been a genuine mystical penetration or just an explosion of the right chemicals), but also had to smile at what seemed like a private joke between Creator and created. It was at the edge of the desert, far beyond the limits of proper Muslims, that my Islam looked anything like the aqq, the Absolute Reality. It was Out There, viewing the center from the outermost edge, that I found my sweetness for the center. For all the erotic disturbances and throw-stones-at-his-head levels of blasphemy, ayahuasca had put me in the right condition for visiting a mosque.
Eyad drove us to one of the big ones in the city. We made slow steps in, still feeling clumsy from what we had been through, and found the restrooms. Sitting on the wudh bench in front of a faucet, I pulled off my socks and rolled up my pant legs and my sleeves and formalized the intention to myself. My mind wasn’t exactly running at full capacity, but I wasn’t “intoxicated” on any level that could have invalidated my prayers. Moving at about a third of my normal speed, I turned on the water and put my right hand under it, washing the hand up to the wrist three times. Then I washed my left hand three times. I scooped up water in my right hand, pushed it into my mouth, and immediately spit it out, three times. Then I brought a handful of water to my nose, sniffed the water in and then snorted it out, three times. Using both hands, I splashed water into my face and made sure that my entire face had been touched. Three times. Then I washed my arms up to the elbows, each three times, starting with the right arm, and wiped my wet hands once over my head. Three times, I wiped the inner and outer parts of my ears with my wet index fingers and thumbs. I wiped my wet hands over the back of my neck. The final act was to wash my feet up to the ankles, three times each, starting with the right.
I had no decoder ring that could tell me what secret messages were hiding within this performance. I washed for the immediacy of my washing itself, the secret knowledge that my arms and feet expressed no secret at all, being symbols of nothing beyond themselves. Even if the visions had expired hours ago, my brain remained wary of having to exert much effort. Being Muslim, doing Islam, worked in moments like this as procedural memory, like riding a bike. I didn’t have to think about it. After washing, I sat, lingering on empty details such as the color of the tiles, the sensation of my arms dripping wet, my face still wet, my bare feet wet, the feeling of the floor. I could at least register the fact that I was now in a state of ritual purity, my body ready for prayer, and that I should guard myself against farting. Did I need to urinate? Briefly focusing attention on my anus and penis, I found no agitations. All systems go. After sitting there long enough to mostly drip-dry, I put my socks back on and stepped out of the restroom with my right foot first.
The prayer hall, the mualla, was constructed in such a way that walking through the door meant that my body already faced the direction of Mecca. I found a spot that felt right and made the intention to myself. Raising my hands to my ears entered me into the state of worship. Allhu Akbar, I mouthed in silence, my gaze lowered to the spot on the floor that my forehead would touch.
Prayer was not only the private voicing of a conviction or wish to a transcendent mystery god outside myself, but an act of my body, a thing that my arms and legs and face did. Like the washing, this embodied act could not be reduced to a single meaning. I did it because I did it. My body performed the standing and bending and prostrating that Muslim bodies were supposed to do, but I prayed without a theology beyond the post-dimethyltryptamine bliss. In this condition, religion had no chance of functioning as an organized package of truth claims. There were no rational arguments or efforts at scriptural legitimation and no institutions to provide them. I possessed nothing that Muslim scholars might recognize as a systematized ‘aqda, no coherent idea of Allh that I could articulate to a community of believers. Perhaps the movements of my external form worked toward the achievement of an inner condition—my arms and legs and spine pulling the right triggers to produce meaning in my brain—or rather expressed a condition that was already there, a devotion that could never be captured in mere text. Either way, prayer after ayahuasca could be only bodywork. What I needed most was a prayer that I could touch and feel, a prayer of my face and hands on soft carpeted floors that might restore my grounding in the world.
During the standing position, I breathed in and with my exhalation recited short excerpts from the Qur’n, which presents itself as a collection of statements from the Lord of All the Worlds. The recitation was silent, but I moved my mouth to make the words. Years ago, I had memorized the short excerpts for this ritual use. Programming the visual, auditory, and semiotic information into my brain, processing the words in my hippocampus and then consolidating and storing them in my neocortex, I made the Qur’n part of myself, something that I retrieve from within myself to fulfill the act of prayer, my prayer as a repetition of something. At this point, were they words? My mouth moved, but my prayer’s power was almost nonlinguistic, neither a speech to myself nor to the mystery god.
Twenty feet away from my prayer, an elderly woman was teaching the same short sras to children, and their recitations of the Qur’n’s introductory sra made it difficult to focus on my own. I did not know if the Allh of my post-ayahuasca prayer matched up at all to the Allh in this old woman’s heart, or the Allh whose words these children memorized; but apart from our inner secrets, we could at least have a shared Allh through our movements and words in this space. Their loud recitations and my silent ones blended into each other. My prayer was spacey, taking much longer than normal, and I loved the stillness between positions. In the prayer’s final seated position, after extending my index finger as a physical testimony to the oneness of Allh, followed by testimony to the messengership of Muammad, I lingered for a long time, knowing that all it took for me to leave the state of prayer was to turn my face to the right and left and say the right formula.
Who received my prayer? The act was both theological and antitheological, affirming an Allh that I had to know but could never know, an Allh whose throne rested above the heavens but who became knowable in the effects of my flesh. In ayahuasca world, Allh had expressed himself through a form. In sober world, Allh was not represented in statues or pictures or anything accessible through my bodily senses but still promised that he was closer to me than the vein in my neck. My body, the only means through which I could begin to comprehend anything, became my sign and proof. My body gave voice to an Allh with no body, both in my recitation of Allh’s speech and my body’s existence.
Ayahuasca, like the Qur’n, both says and unsays. I testified to a big nothing with the vague sense that this nothing was somehow benevolent, that the nothing showed me love (after torture) during my holy drug quest. I named Muammad as the messenger who pointed me to the nothing, and through my testimony named myself in the Muslim family. Who was Muammad? Our invisible father that I would chase after forever, perhaps an idea of being human that I hoped to actualize with my movements and postures. Muammad was an experience that I sought in my skin. Muammad, whoever or whatever he was, had made a brief appearance in my ayahuasca visions, during which he seemed to undergo the same kind of psychic purging and healing that ayahuasca was supposed to give me. Maybe the healing that I witnessed in Muammad signified only what was happening in my own self. Tradition says that if you see Muammad in a dream or vision, you’ve really seen him, because devils cannot assume his form. My relationship to Muammad—that is, my imagination of Muammad—had always been complex, but ayahuasca cleaned him out, or rather cleaned my imagination of him, allowing the two of us to start over. Yearning for Muammad, who was dead and buried but existed everywhere as a set of bodily disciplines, I hoped that adherence to these practices could actualize Muammadness in my heart—producing first a conception of Muammad and then a better lover of Muammad in me.
After my return to the East Coast, I started attending congregational Friday prayers held by the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Sermons by college kids, engineering professors, and community uncles were fairly hit-or-miss, but there was more to our assembly than mere discourse or even conformity of belief. I did not interrogate the brothers and sisters in those congregations for their views on scriptural controversies. Nor am I convinced that terms like mainstream or orthodoxy could hold much power to explain every participant’s private beliefs: MSA kids don’t tend to be theologians. On the other side, they knew nothing of the unacceptable offenses in my head. No one asks for your beliefs at the door. Whatever they/we believed about the fundamental nature of the universe, we could become intelligible Muslims to each other through physical gestures. Moving together in accordance with a shared script, our bodies performed/created a bond between us—and also between our congregation and a larger tradition, because we did not invent those movements. We had to inherit them from somewhere. In acting out the prayer, we followed the movements of Muammad’s body, and the bodies of those who knew him, the people who followed him and loved him and struggled and sometimes drank the water from his ablutions.
This prayer acted as a kind of medicine for me. Following my long run of doctrinal offenses, transgressive actions, questionable affiliations, and drugs, it felt as if I had exhausted the possibilities. The condition of being a Muslim might require that some things be concretized and knowable as “Muslim.” For all the internal breaks and cuts and chaos in my psychedelic visions of gushing blood and theophanic genitalia, I also loved the mosque as a house of predictable behaviors. Stumbling into a mosque while in a state of shock from my interstellar voyage, I still knew what to do and how to interact with my sisters and brothers. In a head like that, perhaps a tradition of practice could anchor me down, stabilizing what had been thrown to the winds.
Embodied practices are often dismissed as irrational and superstitious, and many would see it as a hallmark of post-Enlightenment modernity that good religion does not concern itself with the minutia of ritual performance. Good religion is supposed to focus on consciousness and intentionality; bad religion means marking truth on the body itself. Belief in the importance of the flesh is seen as a primitive worldview that must surrender to the light of abstract, disembodied reason. To have an apparent fixation on “correct” practice causes some Muslims to be ridiculed by their peers, but practice might have been what I needed. After the chemically informed cracking and resealing of my selfhood at the edge of the desert, I felt thankful that being Muslim gave my body a script to follow. Sometimes I prayed because I already believed in the script, but sometimes adherence to the script transformed me into someone who could believe in the script. The Islam that I needed was not intellectual, but operational. After coming down from ayahuasca, you realize that what you do might actually make you what you are.
With this rethinking of my Muslim body, my practice—and the roots of my practice, the predecessors from whom I inherited this technology of Muslim selfhood—began to matter to me in new ways, and I could reconsider the discipline of my brothers at the mosque who rolled up their pant legs because they wanted to imitate the Prophet, whose garments never passed his ankles. These brothers were also the ones who taught me to sit when I pissed because it had been the Prophet’s way. Maybe they weren’t so bad. A lifetime ago, I had a run as one of those guys, but I ditched it all to become the kind of Muslim who consumes psychoactive teas with Amazonian shamans. Muslims often speak of the pant leg–rollers as Salaf—a weapon to use against those who go too far; but what’s a Salaf? Had I been one? After the drugs and visions and Supreme Mathematics, could I be one again? If drug mysticism had opened the door for a new Salafism, could my Salaf turn also be a mystical turn?
AS LONG AS YOU FEAR SOMEONE
“Don’t Fear All Islamists, Fear Salafis,” declares the headline of a New York Times editorial dated August 20, 2012. The piece defines Salafs as “ultraconservative Sunni Muslims vying to define the new order [in this case, postrevolution Tunisia] according to seventh-century religious traditions rather than earthly realities.”3 Salafs are not the same as jihadi militants, says the author, Robin Wright, and many Salafs are antiviolence and politically quietist. But nonetheless, the Salafs’ goals remain “the most anti-Western of any Islamist parties.”
When an article explicitly tells you in its headline to fear people, I feel confident in calling it an example of fearmongering.
“A common denominator among disparate Salafi groups is inspiration and support from Wahhabis, a puritanical strain of Sunni Islam from Saudi Arabia,” Wright explains. She is careful to say that not all Salafs are Wahhbs, “but Wahhabis are basically all Salafis.” For Wright, the issue is that Wahhbs are seeking influence in Tunisia by supporting the Salafs, “as they did 30 years ago by funding the South Asian madrassas that produced Afghanistan’s Taliban.” But at no point does she establish what exactly separates non-Wahhb Salafs (“ultraconservative Sunni Muslims”) from Wahhb Salafism (“a puritanical strain of Sunni Islam”). The matter is further complicated in Wright’s conclusion, in which she warns, “There is something dreadfully wrong with tying America’s future position in the region to the birthplace and bastion of Salafism and its warped vision of a new order.”4 The birthplace and bastion of Salafism, according to Wright’s analysis, is Saudi Arabia, which also happens to be the birthplace and bastion of what she calls Wahhbism.
So Wright’s major points are that Salafism should not be conflated with the broader category of Islamism, not all Salafs are violent, and not all Salafs are Wahhbs, but because all Wahhbs are Salafs, and Salafs are supported and inspired by Wahhbs, and Salafism originated in the land of Wahhbism, and well, shit, I guess Salafism is Wahhbism, we need to fear all Salafs. Wright’s editorial had me more confused about Salafs than before I had read it. When it comes to the Salafiyya, this kind of thing happens a lot.
On top of these complications, we can add that self-identified Salafs have disagreed with each other over who can rightfully claim the label, while some Muslims who might be categorized by others as “Salafs” have argued that Muslims should not call themselves Salaf at all: They see the term as an aberration from what their “Salafism” actually represents. Similarly, the term Wahhbism is flawed beyond repair because it would be hard to find anyone calling himself or herself “Wahhb”; this is a pejorative label that has been imposed on people by their opponents. Between these labels, scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl attempted to coin a third, Salafabism, to represent what he sees as “the Wahhabi co-optation of Salafism.”5 Because Salafism and Wahhbism are already somewhat hazy categories, I am not sure that pushing them together into a third artificial construct is all that helpful.
The New York Times has been talking about Wahhbs since 1928, when it described them as “by nature a warlike people, who are constantly out for massacre and pillage in the name of Allah.” It was “in the blood of all Bedouins, and particularly the Wahabi [sic],” the article explains, “not to respect any law or order, and to rob their neighbors, and even their compatriots.”6 Just four years later, however, the Times reported that Wahhb rule had brought peace and stability to Arabia. The man who had been called the “Wahhabi King,” Ibn Sa’d, is praised as “the greatest Arab of all time and certainly as one of the world’s great men.” The new Wahhb state is compatible with modernity, as “the motor car has been admitted freely.” Resultant social problems, such as an influx of chauffeurs from neighboring regions, “men for the most part without breeding or moral sense,” are being addressed by the government.7
In contrast, the earliest reference to Salafs as a distinct group in The New York Times appears only in 1979, after a group of armed men seized control of the Great Mosque in Mecca. The article states, “The takeover was in the name of the Salafiya [sic] movement,” adding that Saudi royals knew of the Salaf movement’s existence and that the royals belonged to a different group, the “conservative Wahabi sect in the Sunni Moslem branch.” The article characterizes Salafs by their call for a return to the ways of the Prophet and “their Moslem ancestors” and the banning of radio, television, and public employment of women. The Salafs also called for the overthrow of the Saudi government for “what they termed its deviation from Islamic tradition” and hailed their leader as the Mahd, based on apocalyptic traditions that are “not necessarily accepted by the majority of Sunni Moslems, including the Wahabis.”8 In its coverage of the Great Mosque standoff, the Times appears to identify the entirety of the Salaf movement as comprised of “nomads of the Otaiba tribe, who live in the desert northeast of Mecca.”9
After 1979, there is not another mention of Salafs in The New York Times until 2000, in an article on links between Yemeni radicals and Osama bin Laden. The article refers to “the militant form of Salafi Islam that has inspired many militant Islamic organizations.”10 The next discussion of Salafism appears in October 2001. After that, the Salafs are referenced in at least one Times story every year, with the exception of 2008. The articles generally deal with Muslims murdering each other or Americans or threatening peace and freedom in various places. Business really picks up with the so-called Arab Spring, after which Salafs are seen as preeminent forces of chaos and danger amid the newly destabilized politics of places like Tunisia and Egypt. In Libya after the fall of Gaddafi, Muslims bulldozed a Muslim shrine. The Muslims who performed the bulldozing are widely labeled as Salaf, while the Muslim body that had been entombed at the shrine is called a f.
On April 15, 2013, two pressure cooker bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The suspects were identified as two Chechen brothers. A USA Today column additionally marked the men as Salafs, members of Sunn Islam’s “most radical sect.” To provide some context, the writer states that “Salafi warriors swept across the Arabian Peninsula nearly a century ago, wreaking havoc in the name of the king of the new nation of Saudi Arab [sic].” The column’s author, David A. Andelman, explains that Salafism is the “radical ideology” espoused by Al-Qaeda and “violent Chechen revolutionaries,” whom he describes as “Salafis to the core.”11
The Chechen freedom struggle is old, but this alleged Salaf core is new. Traditionally, fighters for Chechen independence were counted among the Muslims called fs. Sometime after the early 1990s, the resistance was taken over by Muslims who were called Salafs and/or Wahhbs. Then the Moscow-backed Chechen government took to promoting a revival of what it called fism, apparently viewing fism as the antidote to any potential for Islamically driven rebellion against the state. The government’s prevailing assumptions seem to be that Salafism makes people angry and violent while fism makes them happy and sleepy. fism is perceived as opium for the masses in the classical Marxist sense, whereas Salafism is crystal meth.
The United States government has also constructed Salafism and Wahhbism as actual things (often interchangeable) and security threats. When “War on Terror” rhetoric needs to avoid making a blanket generalization about all Muslims, it simply generalizes against the subcategory of Salafs/Wahhbs.12 In discourse pitting reformed “good” Muslims against extremist “bad” Muslims, terms like Salaf and Wahhb serve to mark the bad ones. Salafism has been paradoxically marked as both the Islam of radical uprisings against states and the Islam of state-supported “Allh says to obey your rulers” quietism, with its goals described as both actively waging conflict against the enemies of Islam and withdrawing from politics to purify Muslim beliefs and practices. For many Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Salaf or Wahhb can describe any expression of Sunnism that seems archaic, legally and ritually rigid, scripturally literalist, ultraconservative on gender issues, intolerant of the diversity of beliefs and practices within Muslim communities, and the usual suspects whenever something blows up. Even for Muslims who can look past the irresponsible reportage that tags all Salafs as would-be terrorists, the Salafiyya are often condemned as the villains in a global “war for the soul of Islam,” in which the fate of not only Muslims but also the “free world,” “Western civilization,” etc. hangs in the balance. From this perspective, there’s no reason to look closer at the Salafs or try to examine their ideas, because clearly they’re just antirational, antimodern, antihuman fundamentalists who don’t deserve the time of day from us. Do they even have ideas to be examined?
BORDER PATROLS
Looking back on Islam as I had understood it way, way before my chemical turn, I remember concepts and attitudes for which I now consider my teen years to have been my “Salaf phase.” This is somewhat a projection of my current awareness onto my past. In Blue-Eyed Devil, I discuss my youthful “Salafi fear of masturbating” and refusal to look at girls in my “Wahhab days,” but there was nothing distinctly Salaf or Wahhb about it. Thinking of my past as “Salaf,” my grown-man self decides the categories into which my teen self should be placed, against which my teen self remains 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 Wahhb, 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 Wahhb influence, nor the self-appointed voices of moderation who would marginalize Salafism by saying that it accounts for only 3 percent of Sunns. Salafism is not an empirically measurable quantity.
At seventeen years old, I bailed from Catholic high school to study at Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, which was named for the Saudi king who had built it as a gift for the people of Pakistan. The mosque’s educational programs similarly bore the stamp of Saudi power; perhaps it was Saudi money that paid for my plane ticket. Honestly, I don’t remember much of what I learned at Faisal Mosque, apart from a certain hegemonic Sunnism that wouldn’t have to be “Salaf” to achieve what it did for me. While I cherished the experience of life in a Muslim-majority country, I also walked the streets of Islamabad with a guiding assumption that not everything in front of me reflected “true” Islam—that most Muslims around the world had actually diluted their religious practice with culture and innovation, and that I possessed sufficient scriptural knowledge to locate their points of departure from what God had given to the Prophet.
While at Faisal Mosque, I briefly hoped to ditch my studies and join the Chechen resistance against their Russian oppressors, but my mentors talked me out of it. I could do more good for Islam as a writer, they said, reminding me that Muammad had regarded the ink of scholars as holier than the blood of martyrs. Someone back then might have called me a Salaf or a Wahhb, though this has less to do with violence (how one feels about armed struggle is not a reliable measure of Salaf- or Wahhb-ness) than my understanding of history and the claims that I was willing to make. So I went back home, carrying an encyclopedia-size collection of adth volumes on my back, and graduated from high school. At eighteen, I was living in Pittsburgh and spending nights at a mosque that I’d later learn was the city’s “hotbed of Salafism.” During my alleged Salaf years, I did hear my mentors in Pittsburgh and Pakistan emphasize the primacy of the salaf as-salih, the “pious predecessors,” but had no idea that this vocabulary might signify its speaker within a particular communal affiliation. The people around me who stressed that I needed to follow the Salaf believed that the most authentic expression of Islam—in fact the only vision of Islam with any legitimacy whatsoever, the only thing that could be called “Islam” at all—was that of the earliest Muslims. Being a Muslim meant that you committed yourself to following what the Prophet taught to his companions. If you couldn’t make that claim for yourself and stand by it, you stood outside the dn. I came to wager my religion on the unassailable integrity of Muammad’s most immediate heirs: his companions and the generation directly following them and, in turn, the generation after them. These three generations, according to reported statements of the Prophet, were the greatest human beings that this planet would ever see. After their Golden Age, humanity fell into a rapid decline and never stopped.
What I call my Salaf phase ended badly, in part because of my disillusionment with the Golden Age. Every Golden Age is imagined by people who come long after that age and is made possible only by editing, erasing, rewriting, and creatively interpreting communal memory. Many Sunn Muslims insist that belief in the Muslim community’s first four rulers after Muammad as “rightly guided caliphs” remains an inviolable article of faith. To deny this concept would disqualify one as a Sunn (and, for some Sunns, being a non-Sunn would also mean being a non-Muslim); but “rightly guided caliphs” represents a later judgment, which the men who have been assigned this title had never claimed for themselves. The title is an act of rehabilitative nostalgia, created after the point at which right guidance seemed to go south, a longing for what appears—when viewed from a distance, with vision blurred by time—to have been an era of innocence and perfect unity.
Golden Ages are sanitized imaginaries of messy realities and generally fail to survive closer scrutiny. When I started to ask the wrong questions and Islam’s sacred past became more complicated for me—that is, when I learned that my authoritative heroes fought and killed each other in civil wars—the whole edifice came crashing down. The myth of seamless unity among the earliest Muslims collapses pretty easily, and I couldn’t hold up the notion of Islam’s “greatest generations” when these people chopped up the body of Muammad’s own grandson in the desert of Karbala.
For me as a teenager, everything had been based on the collective perfection of the Salaf. The tradition was what they gave us; if we could doubt them, what was left of Islam? Losing my faith in the Salaf felt like losing myself as a Muslim. To some extent, it meant losing Muammad, who was unknowable to me except through the mediation of those who had walked with him. Dismantling the myth of a long-lost Golden Age led me to question the image of Muammad that had been transmitted to us from that generation. I had previously believed in the apologetic boasts that Muammad’s life had been more thoroughly recorded than that of any historical figure prior to modernity—we knew how he cleaned his teeth, how he stood and sat and ate, and so on—but I lost my confidence in the people who told me these things. The truth-making power of Muammad’s life disintegrated.
In the winter of 2002, as I worked on my first novel, The Taqwacores, I had no confidence in my claim to be Muslim, in part because as far as I knew, there was no Muslim community that would have me. The fictional punk house in the story functioned as a kind of mosque for its residents, but a mosque with no imm, which meant that each individual had to become authoritative for his or her own self. This was the Islam of my fantasy, but I did not have faith that it could be real until distributing the book led me to encounters with real-life Muslim punk kids. The notion of a “taqwacore” community signified different things to each of us. One of taqwacore’s appeals for me was its dream that we could make a Muslim community for ourselves without acting as coercive regulatory powers upon each other.
Since I had imagined myself as living in self-imposed exile from a vaguely defined blob of homogenous “orthodoxy,” my comfort came through celebration of the equally slippery term, heresy. Rereading the sacred past as one of fracture and chaos rather than unblemished unity, I championed a positive relationship to all Muslim expressions deemed unacceptable. Instead of treating Islam as a zero-sum game, demanding that all of us are either in or out, I imagined a new binary: the Islam of the center versus an Islam of the margins. If Muammad’s grandson was butchered by the Islam of power and authority, the only conceivable Islam for me would be an Islam that lived on the outside, far from the polished institutions and acceptable Friday-afternoon imms. It became my quest to engage those corners of Islamic tradition that most Muslims would dismiss as absurd or dangerous. It turned out that Islam offered a rich legacy of rebel saints and charismatic weirdos, a long parade of Muslims who were called infidels by their fellow Muslims. Their presence in Islam’s archive changed what the archive could tell me.
With recognition that something had gone terribly wrong in the Golden Age and the Salaf’s imaginary unity, I maintained my attachment to Sh’ism, especially the story of usayn. While Salafs have composed vicious polemical tracts against Sh’ism, charging that Sh’s have transgressed the bounds of proper Islam, I dipped heavy not only into Sh’ism, but the expressions of Sh’ism that even the majority of Sh’s would condemn—the radical so-called ghulat, “exaggerators,” groups from long ago that had elevated members of Muammad’s family to levels approaching prophethood or even divinity. My alternative Islam also came from people like ninth-century ecstatic Mansr al-allj, who allegedly called himself by God’s Name and was executed for building his own Ka’ba in his yard. Retreating from the established voices of Islam’s imaginary center, I found comfort in obscure characters who often amounted to only historical footnotes. One was Muammad al-Zaww (d. 1477), a North African visionary who left behind a vivid diary of his dream encounters with the Prophet, including their arguments over what ethnicity of concubine al-Zaww should purchase (al-Zaww wanted a Turkish concubine, but his imaginal Muammad suggested Ethiopian), and even a vision in which the Prophet personally breastfed him from his left teat, the one closest to his heart.14 Though al-Zaww’s motive for writing his dreambook was “first and foremost an insatiable quest for recognition,” according to scholar Jonathan G. Katz, the quest failed: Al-Zaww became a “failed saint,” more or less forgotten.15 It was partly because of al-Zaww’s failed-saint status that he appealed to me; I dreamed of an Islam written by the losers, an Islam of rejected possibilities and subaltern voices.
On the advice of Malcolm X’s grandson, I picked up Ahmet Karamustafa’s God’s Unruly Friends, a discussion of tattooed and pierced dervishes from the Ottoman Empire who abandoned religious laws, smoked hashish, spread ashes across their naked bodies, begged for food, and said dangerous things about God. I also joined an Iranian f order, the Nimatullahis, which had been founded in the fourteenth century as a Sunn order, reoriented itself as a Sh’ order following Iran’s Sh’ turn in the Safavid period, and largely dropped any self-identification as “Muslim” after the 1979 revolution. “We don’t advocate reading Qur’n here,” a Nimatullahi shaykh told me.
Exploring America’s unique Muslim heritages, I looked beyond the standard narratives of Sunn triumphalism that had moved me as a teenager—i.e., Malcolm X was duped into following a charlatan cult leader until he went to Mecca and discovered genuine Islam—to consider the teachings and mission of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in a serious way. This led to my encountering the Five Percenter community, which had originated in 1960s Harlem with what a vast majority of Muslims would consider the most outrageous offense possible: a man naming himself Allh. Seeing themselves as their own gods, the Five Percenters lived Islam as they personally saw fit; there were no imms or shaykhs or ‘ulama who could tell them anything. Clerics could never offer genuine transcendence: No matter how many verses they had memorized, the invisible “mystery god” for whom they claimed to speak remained invisible. Mastery of a textual tradition brought no one closer to transcendent knowledge; for Five Percenters, this made the business of religious authority a con game, because the scholars cannot claim to possess anything that you don’t already have inherent within yourself. That idea nourished me for a long time, placing the Qur’n and Muslim traditions, along with full power to determine their meanings and value, in my own hands.
Because the Five Percenter movement was young enough for me to become a student of men who had walked with that first Allh from the ’60s, I often imagined the culture with parallels to the seventh-century community of Muammad and his Companions. Inheriting a legacy from the first Five Percenter generation, I could be classified within the Five Percenter tradition’s equivalent of what Sunns call the Tbi’n, the Followers. The righteous name that I was given reflects this inheritance: My primary teacher had been named by the first Allh himself, and Azreal in turn named me Azreal Wisdom, which meant “Azreal No. 2” in Five Percenter vocabulary. Traveling in a young tradition, I witnessed competing memories, power struggles, and a narrowing field of possibility as debate was suppressed, and reinterpretations and innovations found themselves projected backward upon the authority of foundational figures. Similar to the constructions of orthodoxy in broader Muslim traditions, Five Percenters imagined their tradition to have emerged fully formed and coherent in an instant “Big Bang” moment, rather than having taken shape over time as a historical process. In my engagement of Five Percenter tradition, guided by the elders who taught me, I made my own choices about which texts and historical personalities I would treat as authoritative.
I also experienced community with the new phenomenon of “progressive Muslims” who sought gender-egalitarian modes of understanding the Qur’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 Sunns, Sh’s, and members of other communities to come together, but also for believing Muslims to accept their brother/sisterhood with “cultural” or “secular” Muslims who did not necessarily believe in Islam’s supernatural components, but still maintained an attachment to their Muslim heritage. In this hodge-podge of Muslims who felt like exiles for any number of reasons, the singular shared value was acceptance.
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 hegemony. By mocking and negating that power, they changed the rules of what was thinkable to me as “Islamic” and what kinds of possibilities awaited me outside the bounds of popular Muslim recognition. They provided me with new spaces to claim my own self as a righteous Muslim self. Perhaps all that I really wanted was a queering of Sunnism.
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’s and fs of various strands, Five Percenters, and taqwacore kids might have had nothing in common beyond a mutual distaste for Salafism: They could share only in an artificial unity that Salafism imposed on them from outside. But if I sought value from every corner of our vast tradition, why couldn’t I approach the Salafiyya? Did they have nothing to say? Did they expose the limits of my own happy Muslim pluralism?
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 project, even if that project is doomed before it starts, pulls me in.
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 imm Suhaib Webb. Journalist Omar Sacirbey (the same writer, by the way, who first broke “Muslim punk rock” as a national story and thus opened the floodgates for several years of awful media mythmaking) mentions the Salafiyya in passing as a tag of blame, a dangerous charge that has been hurled at Webb by his opponents. A critic accused Webb of affiliation with the “hardline Salaf sect of Islam”; Webb, in response, “denied being a Salaf disciple and said he follows the Maliki Islamic school.”17 Without any examination of what it means to follow one or the other, the article leads us to assume that Malikis must be better than Salafs, and then clears Webb’s name of links to the undesirable latter. The New York Times gives a similar treatment to Yasir Qadhi, emphasizing that he sparked controversy among Salafs for adopting a “more moderate message” while adding that he shows respect for fs, a “mystical branch of Islam that Salafis have traditionally denounced.”18 Perhaps the most telling moment in the article comes when the Times describes Qadhi’s platform, the AlMaghrib Institute, as representing “an ultraconservative movement known as Salafiya,” adding that Qadhi has embarked on repackaging the institute as “orthodox with a capital O.”19 For Qadhi to find play as a fully “mainstream” Muslim leader, he had to steer his brand away from the stigma of the Salaf brand. What I’ve learned here: Despite our assumptions of what it means to be “orthodox” and “conservative,” Salafism isn’t simply “ultra-orthodox” but might ironically be the biggest heresy in town, the most problematic and marginalized affiliation available. If it has been my job description over the past decade to take seriously groups and thinkers who are almost never taken seriously, I need to look at the despised and ridiculed Salafiyya.
As Salafs claim to represent the elite “saved sect” and argue that the majority of Muslims have gotten Islam wrong—that the legal schools and f orders and classical theologians and modern reformers and everyone else at best represent fallible human efforts, but also threaten to compromise, neglect, distort, or erase what the Prophet had given us—they actually push themselves beyond what most people might call Islamic “orthodoxy.” At least in their impossible promise, the Salafiyya rejects everything except the Qur’n and the prophetic Sunna as unacceptable innovation. When they take it this far, Salafs have to be the ultimate heretics, the rebels who reject any compromise to norms that they cannot respect. Salafism is certainly a marginalized heresy for many of the Muslim circles in which I run and the most antiestablishment vision of Islam within my reach—relative, of course, to which establishment we’re talking about, and also which variety of Salafism. When I wrote critically of Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV) and its leader, Ani Zonneveld, she blasted me with what must have struck her as an all-time unanswerable burn: “Michael Muhammad Knight . . . you are no better than the Salafis in the mosques.” Depending on whom you want to irritate, Salafism could look like the new punk rock.
This became clear when I started writing a weekly column for VICE and took on popular Muslim voices with the argument that what they presented as timeless, universal Islam was just their personal construction, formulated within the limiting fishbowl of their own time and place. When a white convert Muslim chaplain at a university gave a Friday sermon about the “Islamic perspective” on sexuality, I offered the criticism that what he presented as a transhistorically Islamic position was entirely informed by contemporary and somewhat liberalized Western Protestant notions of heteronormative monogamous marriage. It worked for his audience, which consisted of university kids who were not likely to participate in plural marriage, let alone concubinage, and who believed that “Islam” fundamentally empowered everyone—men and women alike—as autonomous individual subjects. That’s an appealing construction of Islam for the Muslim Students’ Association of wherever this sermon was given, but it’s not the Islam, if the Islam is supposed to be consistent across time and space: It’s not an “Islamic sexuality” that people could have understood fourteen hundred years ago. My commentary on the sermon, after I sat back and read it a few times, seemed to operate on a kind of Salaf logic: I had basically argued that the sermon made a conflation of personal opinion with Islam and could not scripturally defend itself with our agreed-upon “authentic sources.”
Conservatives can dismiss progressives as producing an Islam defined by “Western” values, but they often play by the same rules. There’s a particular kind of male convert that I have in mind here, a man who fails to recognize misogyny as a deeply embedded American norm. Growing up in American patriarchy, he ingests old-fashioned American heterosexism and male privilege, later becomes Muslim, and then projects his culturally learned American antifeminism onto his newfound religious identity. Pretending that he has transcended American culture (a culture that he strangely perceives as having been overrun with radical feminists and queers who impose their hegemony on everyone), he claims to defend the Timeless Tradition of the Brown World against those who wish to dilute it with secular Western theories and methods. He picks up enough of those theories and methods and critical vocabularies to deconstruct his opponents’ assumptions of universal truth and the flows of power that produce them but never turns that weapon upon his own prejudices and assumptions. As his principled heterosexism names the points at which Islam’s integrity is most threatened, he rewrites American patriarchy in Timeless Tradition’s vocabulary and presents it as counterculture, a resistance against Euro-American global domination. You can either care about fighting gender inequality and homophobia, he says, or you can value the preservation of Islam against Western knowledge regimes. He condemns the colonization of Islam by Western neoliberals but has no fear of the same work by Western neotraditionalists, and he ironically uses anticolonial arguments to silence the voices of brown women. It’s not me, he swears, it’s just what the Tradition says. For his big finishing move, he justifies an arrogant and authoritarian view of the Tradition by reminding you how meek and humble its great scholars were. Watch out for these boys. They were sexists and homophobes before they ever heard of the Prophet.
Writing on popular shaykh (and another white convert) Hamza Yusuf, I discussed Yusuf’s articulation of “classical Islamic tradition” as part of his carefully sculpted brand. What Yusuf offered, my piece suggested, was not reducible to “classical” or “traditional” Islam, but represented Yusuf’s own scholarly imagination. I might have been issuing these critiques from my own position as pro-queer, pro-heresy, Sh’ Nimatullahi Five Percenter consumer of hallucinogens, but my articles still challenged so-called mainstream Sunn leaders on their own attempts to speak for the pure and real. Deconstruction had become my fundamentalism.
The move of Salaf deconstruction is unstoppable, because once you realize the critical problems of reading texts and reproducing the past and all that, then you surrender any hope for retrieving a “true” Islam that’s based objectively on “what the book says.” You no longer get to dismiss your rivals with the naive critique “That’s not religion, it’s culture,” because you can’t claim to have stepped out of “culture” yourself. A deconstructive read of the Salaf does not throw us into a fantasmic Golden Age of unblemished hegemony and absolute coherence but instead opens us to more fracture and disunity. Salafism is not simply antimodern as so often imagined but potentially postmodern, shutting down empty promises of essences and universals, giving cynical smirks to the supposed light of human reason, and revealing all opponents to be squarely situated within the specific contexts and modern regimes of sense that made them possible.
The problem, then, wouldn’t be that I’m too permissive with my religion, or too confident in bending and twisting the texts to make them say exactly what I want them to say. It’s that they are—the superstar imms and shaykhs and scholars who feed their communities an easily digestible product that they call “Islam” because neither they nor their communities want anything too complicated. Despite all their big talk about preserving or reviving “tradition,” they must also take liberties with it.
Five Percenter lessons ask the question, “To make devil, what must one first do?” The lessons’ answer: “To make devil, one must begin grafting from the original.” For Salafism as I read it, everything is grafted, diluted, and corrupt. Every method is doomed. There’s something potentially liberatory in the assertion that Islam as we have received it, an Islam that has taken centuries of elaboration and systematization and generations of brilliant minds to develop, represents a pollution of the pure. The great schools and methodologies offer the helpful work of humans, but if we had to, we could survive without them. A foundational intellect like al-Ghazl was not the Prophet Muammad, nor was he a companion of the Prophet or someone who had known a companion; he lived centuries too late to even know someone who had known someone who had known a companion. Al-Ghazl represents the “essence” of Islam only if we regard Islam as something that starts post-Ghazl. Ripping away the elaborations, Salafism stands to unsettle communities, which can be alternately dangerous or useful. A theoretically savvy Salafiyya—if ingesting modern critical theory didn’t betray the whole point of being Salaf—could subvert the dominant narratives, tear down established norms, turn power relations upside down, and open up new possibilities. The Five Percenters had me asserting full agency over the text, creating its meaning for myself: Salafism has me doing away with interpretation, which could lead not to simple “literalism” or “fundamentalism” but to another agency altogether.
The Salafiyya look to the pristine origins as a means of anchoring and centering Islam, but what if I get the opposite result? Every interpretation, subject to the limits of interpretation, risks promoting the inauthentic. But inauthentic compared to what? When I call out others for their problematic readings, is it because I still cling to this idea that a greater authenticity awaits us out there? Where is this perfect Islam against which I measure all imperfect simulations? Without faith in the way of the Salaf as a reachable finish line, my Salafism trolls everyone, becoming the big No to all claims of apprehending the truth of the Qur’n or the earliest Muslims; but this Salaf No comes with a price. My Salafism diagnoses the problem but gives no cure, because Salafism cannot survive its own critique. There’s more than one way to bulldoze a shrine. If everything is bida’, this includes the Salafiyya themselves, along with the premodern heroes whom they glorify as defenders of the real. Though I’d love to return to the origins of my tradition and dig up the uncorrupted Islam of the Salaf, I have to ask whether this is even possible, which means facing the consequences when such a project falls apart and I end up with nothing. Whether we denounce the tradition’s diversity or speak of Islam in the plural and accept all “Islams” as equally valid, we sacrifice the potential for an absolute, pure-in-itself Islam.
“Straight to the sources,” everyone says, even anti-Salafs who produce their own ironic mirrors of Salafism. What are these sources, and how does one return “straight” to them? Can a Qur’n website—offering multiple translations, a searchable concordance of Arabic roots, annotations of every verse with displays of the Arabic grammar, syntax, and morphology, and audio recordings of recitation—reproduce the original Islam of fifteen centuries ago? Or perhaps the original Islam awaits me in online archives of Salaf articles in PDF format? I am not sitting at the feet of a scholar to experience traditional transmission of knowledge, but some Salafs would scroll through pristine Tradition with a cursor in the shape of a white-gloved cartoon hand.
Operating instead as a tool of alienation and negation, Salafism can perform the same destabilizing work as my pro-heresy pluralism; Salafism threatens to erase every Muslim imaginary, including mine, and then its own. If we issue Salaf critiques but confess to mediation as an inescapable fact of our lives as readers, Salafism then becomes as empty a signifier as Islam itself. In its power to deny every truth claim, Salafism ironically denies its own privilege to name the rules.
While engaging the modern phenomenon of Salafism does not instantly bring me face-to-face with the Prophet and his generation, it at least returns me to my origins, recovering the history that shaped me as a particular kind of Muslim. I didn’t simply convert to Islam, but rather the version of Islam that could come together from the books, pamphlets, and lecture tapes that people threw at me in the 1990s. I didn’t just go to Pakistan, but a particular version of Pakistan, imagined and produced by the people and institutions who brought me there and walked me through it.
These white convert dudes who end up as figures in the public personality game tend to authorize themselves through overseas travel. Hamza Yusuf found his cred in the North African desert, coming home with a white-man Orientalist narrative of having learned at the feet of what he calls “living fossils” who exist “almost halfway in the dream world,” custodians of a capitalized “Tradition” beyond time and space.20 Suhaib Webb studied at Cairo’s al-Azhar, the widely recognized center 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.
