sunni-islamic-movements

"The Dar al-Ulum is of course well known. Started in 1866, it is often referred to as the Al-Azhar of India. From its beginning it was profoundly anti-West, it was anti-modern. Accordingly, many persons associated with it exerted themselves to undermine the British. That opposition was an aspect of its commitment to orthodoxy."

"Lauding this commitment to orthodoxy as one of the hallmarks of the Dar al-Ulum, a Government of India publication, Centres of Islamic Learning in India, says : 'One of the main objects of the Darul Ulum was to provide the Indian Muslims with a direct access to the original sources of Islamic Learning, produce learned men with missionary zeal to work among the Muslim masses to create a truly religious awakening towards classical Islam, ridding the prevalent one in India of innovation and unorthodox practices, observances and beliefs that have crept into it and to impart instruction in classical religion. The Darul Ulum has achieved this aim to a great extent, having been undoubtedly the greatest source of orthodox Islam in India, fighting, on the one hand, religious innovation (bid’at) and, on the other, cultural and religious apostasy under Western or local influences. It has succeeded in instilling in its alumni the spirit of classical Islamic ideology which has been its motto. As a matter of fact, Deoband has established itself as a school of religious thought—a large number of religious madrasahs were founded on its lines throughout the country by those who graduated from it, thus bringing classic religious instruction to large sections of Muslim masses. Some of these schools and colleges have in their right become renowned centres of learning...' That praise for re-establishing orthodoxy in Islam, for purging it of bid’at, a condemnatory word for heretical ‘innovation’, for purging it of ‘religious apostasy’ which the study says had crept into it ‘under Western or local influences’, that approbation is from a publication of our secular government! But at the moment I am on the institution’s fatwas."

"Ordinary people began to approach the Dar al-Ulum very early on for rulings on all sorts of matters. Soon enough the demand became so considerable that it could not be handled on an ad hoc basis. In 1892 a separate department was set up for issuing fatwas. By now literally a few lakh matters have been settled by the institution’s fatwas. Initially the fatwa would be issued, and that would be the end of the matter. No copy of the fatwa would be kept, no record would remain. Eventually, copies began to be kept. For decades these were stored merely by the date on which the fatwa had been issued. On a visit to the institution soon after Independence, Maulana Azad, then the country’s education minister and one of the most important figures in Pandit Nehru’s government, himself commended the work which the institution had been doing in this field—it is a great religious service, he said, by which the difficulties of the people are being removed. He urged that a collection of them be published. Grouping the fatwas by subject, weeding out the repetitions, and selecting the ones that settled the more general principles of law on the matter took many years of painstaking effort. It was in 1962 that the Dar al-Ulum began publishing the fatwas in volumes organized around subjects."

"The Ahl-i-Hadis have been an influential reform movement, one is almost tempted to say a self-righteous movement except for the fact that that expression would be true of almost all the other groups too—who could have excelled Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan in being certain that he alone was right? The Ahl-i-Hadis did not capture the masses, but their influence far exceeded the numbers who professed adherence to them. And there were good reasons for this: they had a large number of followers among the ‘aristocracy’, they had great influence at courts such as that of Bhopal; more important, they came in a sense to set the norms. This was because of their basic position: they taught that instead of going by the rulings of any of the law schools one should regulate one’s life by the Sunna of the Prophet, that is by what the Prophet himself had said, by the way he himself had acted. As the sayings and deeds of the Prophet are set out in the Hadis, they styled themselves as the Ahl-i-Hadis. They were also known as the Muhammadis and the Wahabis. They proclaimed that the world was about to end soon, in particular any time from 1884 as the fourteenth century of the Islamic era had begun that year and the Prophet had declared that the world would end in that century. This lent an urgency to their mission. They held that going back to the Hadis was the way to bring the Muslims together—for one could thereby vault over the feuds that had arisen among the law schools. They also introduced innovations in the manner of saying the namaz: some of these would appear trivial to the observer—should one lean on one knee or both, should one say Amin audibly or softly; but, as we shall see, these are exactly the sorts of things over which sects break each other’s heads; moreover, other changes which they decreed were not just in ritual—they taught, for instance, that nothing was to be gained by observing the urs etc., of pirs, that nothing was to be gained by namaz for the dead. Campaigns were always afoot, therefore, to prevent them from praying in mosques used by other Muslims."

"They inveighed against all syncretistic practices, condemning all these as vestiges of paganism and polytheism. They denounced the Barelvis for advocating observances of special days connected with ‘saints’ and the like; they denounced the Deobandis for basing their prescriptions on the jurists rather than on the Quran and the Sunna of the Prophet. As happens with all purist groups, while they succeeded in influencing other sects, a sub-sect grew from within which maintained that they were not pure enough: the Ahl-i-Hadis had argued that the others had departed from the true path by going by the rulings of sundry law schools rather than by regulating life in accordance with what the Prophet had said and done. From within them grew the Ahl-i-Quran who declared that the Ahl-i-Hadis had gone just as grievously wrong by putting all the stress on the Hadis. ‘What about the Quran?’ they asked. Allah, not the Prophet should be the Guide, His word should be the determinant. The Ahl-i-Hadis had set out to unite the Muslims. They became another sect, indeed a sect on account of which there were many contentions. The four-volume set, Fatawa-i-Ahl-i-Hadis, was published between 1981 and 1989."

"There is no definition of cults in law. on the other hand, these organizations know perfectly evade justice by hiding their true nature, since you are aware that freedom of conscience in France is a fundamental freedom enshrined in all our principles and our texts."

"I say also: watch (…) to any signs that would suggest that there a disempowerment. That those who plunge into Salafism are somehow victims of a great handling as regards sects. No, there is also that part of personal will that you should never rule out."

"Can a state be both the target of Islamist extremists and responsible for their actions? The attacks on July 4 in three Saudi Arabian cities, almost certainly perpetrated by adherents of Islamic State, have once again raised this question for drive-by analysts. They point out that the official interpretation of Islam in Saudi Arabia, which outsiders refer to as Wahhabism and Saudis refer to as Salafism, shares many elements with extremist ideology. Then they argue that played a role in the development of the global movement, and that the Saudis thus bear a special responsibility to rein in their support for Muslim institutions outside their borders and to moderate their practice of Islam at home. The implication is that if the Saudis would only change their behavior, the threat represented by the radicals would be greatly reduced."

"With the oil revolution of the 1970s, the Saudis had enormous resources to support that effort. In the 1980s, the Saudis (along with the United States) supported a campaign in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union that both they and Washington were happy to call a jihad. At that point, the Saudis lost control of global Salafism, if they ever really had it."

"It time to declare outlawed. As sectarian drift, or as affecting the fundamental interests of the Nation, choose the safest way."

"What had been a largely apolitical phenomenon of Muslims emulating Saudi Wahhabism in their personal lives became, for part of the global Salafi movement, an element of their political identity."

"Salafism morphed into a religious movement with a number of political manifestations, only one of which was the blend of social conservatism and political quietism represented by the official Saudi variant."

"Global Salafism is now unmoored from its Saudi origins."

"The Saudis can also contribute to the ideological fight against , but not in the way most Western liberals think. The admonition for “tolerance” has much to recommend it as Saudi leaders think long term, but the more immediate task is to convince those attracted to Salafism that the violent path is, as the Saudi clerics say, “deviant.” Liberal “reforms” in Saudi Arabia are not going to convince pious Salafis that their interpretation of Islam is incorrect. Rather, the Saudis have to redouble their efforts to use the domestic and international institutions of Islam that they created and funded to convince believers that Salafi Islam itself prohibits the acts of violence perpetrated in its name."

"Saudi Wahhabism is profoundly quietist politically. It calls on Muslims to obey their rulers, as long as those rulers implement Islam, however imperfectly, in their society. (That is not particularly surprising for a .) The success of the jihad in Afghanistan, however, lent a revolutionary political content to global Salafism for some of its adherents, like Osama bin Laden, which soon became a direct threat to the Saudi regime and all other Muslim governments around the world."

"Abdelaziz was the descendant of Muhammad ibn (son of) Saud, founder of the Al-Saud dynasty. From the deep interior of Najd, Abdelaziz brought with him two centuries of a particular brand of Islam that his ancestors had espoused in a political and familial alliance with one man: Muhammad ibn Abdelwahhab. Ultra-orthodox and fundamentalist, the eighteenth-century religious preacher led an exclusionary revivalist movement, following in the footsteps of others who had called for a return to the ways of the salaf, the ancestors, the first generation of Muslims. There were those Salafists who believed that following the righteous salaf, al-salaf al-saleh, dictated a return to the exact way of life of the prophet. In the early twentieth century, there would be modernist Salafists, such as the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh, who believed it was important to rid Islam of centuries of acquired traditions and accretions and return to the purity of prophet’s teachings, which actually provided the answers needed to adapt religion to modernity. Only after 9/11 did the term Salafist become known worldwide, used exclusively to denote the stricter outlook with Salafist jihadists resorting to violence to impose their views."

"We will not put up with Salafist associations and their backers flouting our rules and bringing our rule of law into question and convincing young people that they want to join the so-called IS."

"What happened in Brussels was a co-production by adepts of two sick ideologies. The first one is Islamism in its many versions, including Khomeinism in Iran, Talibanism in Afghanistan, Salafism in Arab countries, Boko Haram in , and ISIS and its offshoots across the globe. It will remain firmly in place until it implodes under the weight of its savage contradictions, as did the old Soviet Union, or is defeated in a war, as was the case with Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan. The other co-producer, the mushy and politically correct “liberal” ideology that has seduced segments of opinion in Western democracies, can and must be combated by all those who wish to protect the democratic system in an increasingly dangerous world."

"Salafis, which has destroyed and perverted a part of the , is a threat for Muslims, and also a danger for France."