Spelling Danger & Why I Left Salafism

Some people move on to bigger things; I am moved by smaller ones. Phonetic and logical inaccuracy annoy me to no end. The North American Traditional Muslim™ crowd, mainly populated by second-generation Muslim immigrants and converts to Islam, has a habit of writing shayukh instead of shuyukh (the plural of shaykh). To me, this misspelling undermines the academic level of the person writing. I cannot help but immediately labeling the person as a dilettante, a mere dabbler, or, as they used to call them at the University of Waterloo, a plugger (i.e. someone who plugs in values into formulas and doesn't really understand what's going on). A similar phenomenon is present here in Jordan where the majority of people seem to think that salli is spelled with a ya'. It is not. In fact, the correct spelling is صل not صلي, as is commonly found.

One might find it surprising that someone who left Salafism for Traditional Islam finds such technicalities relevant, let alone annoying enough to blog about. For me, it wasn't the heart-touching speeches of Sufi charlatans or charming nashids that moved me away from Salafism to Traditional Islam. The spirituality and beautiful power of Qur'anic recitation is and always will be more than enough in those regards. Rather, it was that, at the end of the day, Salafism just didn't have much to offer on the intellectual front; it wasn't accurate enough and it lacked depth.

My first breach with Salafism was in the fiqh department, when I found that the logical conclusion of Salafi methodology was for me to become an absolute mujtahid. I seriously attempted this for a while, only to find that I was (obviously) unqualified. If I had to follow someone else's reasoning, it appeared, then why would I follow a modern scholar instead of someone whose scholarship was attested to across history? Without getting into the long back-and-forth arguments and counter-arguments I went through (as the process was long-winded and gradual, spanning years), I eventually decided to follow a school of thought in fiqh matters. Not only did I find the credentials of the scholars of the schools of thought more impressive than those of modern scholars, I also found there to be an aromatic depth to their books that was simply lacking in the books that I was used to. Finally, I found that an honest survey of scholars over the centuries revealed that virtually all of them followed schools of thought. This pattern did not disappear after the spread of academies and libraries, so the argument that people followed schools of thought out of not having the sea of textual evidence before them was unfounded.

My next breach was in the acceptance of Sufism in principle. At the time I was taking classes with Dr. Nazih Hammad from North Vancouver. A great Sufi charlatan came to visit Vancouver and caused a bit of a hoo-la-baloo. Someone asked Dr. Nazih Hammad about Sufism after which he explained the difference between Sunni Sufism and Bid`i (Innovative) Sufism. Once I heard him described Sunni Sufism, I knew that this was it: this was the Real McCoy I had always wanted.

A few moves, timezones, cities, and years later, I had finished studying the basic fiqh of purification and prayer in the Shafi'i school and was in Tampa, Florida, where I read the matn of Ibn Ashir with Sheikh Khatri Ould Beibeh of Mauritania. At first, he didn't want to read the section on aqida in detail as he said it caused some confusion among people in America. I explained to him that this detailed discussion on creed was exactly what I was looking for. He asked me if I was an engineer, and when I told him I was, he said that it was mostly engineers who understood the section. What I found was that Ash'ari creed, far from being the boogie man I grew up believing it to be, was an organized, methodologically-sound medium for presenting and defending Islamic belief. Never before was I better equipped to answer the questioning of faith in general, and Islamic belief in particular, than after I studied aqida with Sheikh Khatri. A door had opened: I could now reason about faith without becoming confused, alhamdulillah. Not only were the Ash'aris not boogie men, they deserved much heartfelt prayer from us for defending the faith against the onslaught of deviant sects by organizing it and presenting it logically.

My final departure with Salafism was upon finding the students of Sheikh Nuh Keller in Silicon Valley. After presenting a number of outstanding questions in my mind about Sufism to his students, I was disappointed with their answers, which didn't quite satisfy me. One of the murids in the Bay Area lent me a set of ten tapes. The tape set presented Sufism practically (and not just in principle) in an incredibly logical manner, from first principles. Where others had waved their hands and stumbled, Sheikh Nuh explained with reason.

May Allah preserve all our shuyukh, and our spelling.