Salafi
Overview
Salafi Muslims try as hard as they can to imitate Muhammad in every aspect of life, taking Muhammad's Companions and the two generations following them as exemplary models.
As whatever we know about Muhammad's Companions comes through later human traditions, to carry out this endeavour clearly involves elevating later human traditions up on to the same rank as the Qu'ran itself, pursuing and implementing the traditions of man as if they are the Word of God.
As to the basic question of the reliability of human traditions, if it's hard enough in today's world of cameras and tape recorders to know what really happened on many occasions, it should be considered how unreliable is the testimony of man passed down over many generations.
The Salafi approach is founded on the hadith, "The best of people is my generation, then those that follow them, then those that follow them." (Bukhari, d. 256 AH)
It is very hard to imagine Muhammad or any Prophet making such a statement, from all that we know of Him and His Companions, or any Prophet's Companions, who are usually a pretty rash lot struggling to escape the marshland of their old ways, distinguished more for their enthusiasm than for their wisdom or understanding; this hadith, however, is far more in keeping with being composed by men of a later generation, out of the wish to highlight present degeneracy by contrasting it to an imagined golden era of peace, order and wisdom in the time of the Prophet, and the obvious depiction of a gradual process of deviation from the original well-understood message. The reality, is that there is no such golden era, because a Prophet does not plant a fully-formed tree, but plants a seed in the hearts of ordinary people that grows up and increases in stature over many generations and spreads out its branches for all the heavenly birds amongst men to shelter within, eventually yielding its fruits for all nations to feed from.
Sunnah and Qu'ran
Anyone looking with open eyes at the sunnah and also the Qu'ran, will instantly be struck by one outstanding observation: the Qu'ran and sunnah are very different; and not merely different, but of an entirely opposite Spirit. The sunnah are obsessed with detailed rituals and requirements, whilst the Qu'ran is not merely wholly devoid of interest in such things, but does its best actively to purge people of such obsessions. The conclusion is unavoidable: the things the Qu'ran endeavoured to wipe out, survived and spread in the sunnah. The sunnah, being almost entirely contrary to the Spirit of Muhammad and the Qu'ran, should be entirely dismissed as a guide to one's life. The main value of sunnah and hadith lies in their historical record of how certain influencial individuals were projecting Islam hundreds of years after Muhammad, of ingrained superstitions and practices predating Islam seeking justification to survive the godly purge.
Muslim historians have long established that huge numbers of people arose and deliberately fabricated tens of thousands of hadith and sunnah after the passing of Muhammad; the very fact that Muslim historians from early on begin to give chains of narrators for everything they quote, is a testimony to the gargantuan scholarly crisis brought about by these story-tellers making fast money and reputation out of the people. These chains of narrators even perform the miraculous feat of getting better with each passing generation; an early version going back to a muslim, becomes later narrated back to a companion, and then still later is narrated back to the Prophet Himself. The reality is, humanity invariably closes the door only after the horse has already bolted free: sunnah and hadith are intrinsically unreliable.
Companions as Exemplars
If you look at any period of great spiritual reform about which there is any historical clarity, it is quite clear that the Reformer has a very clear idea of what his goal is, and his companions most of the time simply don't "get" it, and do the most counterproductive things through the best of intentions, either through old habits dying hard, or imitating what they think they saw or heard or understood the reformer to do or say. They get top marks for enthusiasm, and are extremely variable in everything else. The Reformer patiently takes things in easy stages of change so that people can follow through from where they are to where he wants them to be, and after his death desires them to continue with progress and change in the same spirit of reform, generally very flexible and accomodating over everything except a few core principles, sometimes doing one thing in one circumstance, and entirely the opposite in an identically-looking circumstance. His followers, lacking insight, will often cling hopelessly to the ever-changing acts and words of the agile Reformer as if they are absolute truths intended for posterity, and repeat them without wisdom at invalid times or in an invalid way, and when the reformer dies, attempt to fossilise the state of things rather than continue the reform in the spirit the reformer has set them out upon.
East and West, Left and Right
So for example, Muhammad commands his followers to turn from Mecca to pray to Jerusalem, and then later he commands them to turn back to praying to Mecca. Many muslims were very tested by this and abandoned their faith.
If you try to imitate but don't understand the Reformer's deeper motive, your imitation will be blind and often foolish, and you will be dashed against the rocks of your ignorance; obsessed with the direction of prayer, you would never understand that, "To Allah belong the east and the west: wheresoever you turn, there is the presence of Allah. For Allah is all-Pervading, all-Knowing." [2:115], and, "Righteousness does not consist in whether you face towards east or west. The righteous man is he who believes in Allah and the Last Day, in the angels, scriptures and Prophets; who for the love of Allah gives his wealth to his kinfolk, to the orphans, to the needy, to the wayfarers and to the beggars, and for the redemption of captives; who attends to his prayers and pays the alms-tax; who is true to his promises and is steadfast in trial and adversity and in times of war. Such are the true believers such are the God-fearing." Such verses unambiguously denounce in clear words the spirit of all those many hadith and sunnah about doing things on your left or right, which are the products of pagan customs and superstitions surviving Islam, hijhacking the man-made vehicle of sunnah and hadith as a way of evading the command of the Qu'ran to abandon them.
Muhammad will surely have done things on the left and the right. If the people had a superstition that it was auspicious to enter on the right foot and leave on the left, perhaps Muhammad would enter that way for people he was pleased to meet, and enter with the other foot to those who he was displeased with, or desired to challenge the superstitions of. If he were living his mission today, he might turn up for an important person or meeting in a suit and tie, and hadith and sunnah would then record Muhammad's wearing of a suit and tie, and his later followers would all feel it is their religious duty to imitate him by wearing the same, and frown upon those who didn't wear a suit and tie as spiritually lost. Such actions tell you very little about what the Reformer actually wants people to wear and do, it tells you only about the social conventions and customs the Reformer has to live and work within in order to encounter people and gradually spread his reforms. Those people who copy them in the illusion that they are being righteous and spiritually superior, are only manifesting a blindness of heart and spirit: the same blindness as in a scribe copying out a page of foreign language they cannot read. So much of what is in the sunnah and hadith simply record the framework of conventions Muhammad had to work within to reach people with His message, and are of no use for guiding today's life with its different conventions, particularly as they are at such odds with the spirit and intent of the Qu'ran. After passing from this world, the imitators of such deeds will say, "O Allah, I did this on the left, and that on the right, and prayed at these times," and that Just One will reply, "I have no interest in left or right, and the fragrance of your prayer that reached Me was so filled with the dying stench of moral superiority that heaven held its nose and shrank away; rather, tell me all the good words you spoke with loving kindness, and the acts you did with deep compassion and love, for those are what are of value here."
Enthusiasm and the Will of God
Emulating the raw enthusiasm of selected early followers of Muhammad is a very fine thing, as the basis of all our actions should be our attraction to the Will of God. The early followers of Muhammad are, however, a very poor choice in determining what the Will of God actually is for any age or person but their own, if even that.
At one level, the Will of God is not an absolute thing. The Will of God for you in your life differs markedly from what God Wills for me in my life. God's Will for an eskimo society is different from God's Will for a city society, and God's Will for one generation is different to God's Will for the next. Society, groups and individuals are ever-changing, and God's Will is in a dynamic interplay with their ever-changing circumstances. Even if you found a noble Companion of Muhammad who understood the Will of God, that wouldn't be greatly useful for you today, as you would already need to understand the Will of God to distinguish what was purely for their times, and what was for the whole epoch of Islam, and if you could do that, you would already see for yourself and wouldn't need to be copying the Companions. Blind copying is for the blind who cannot see, who, when they copy, do not know who or what they are actually following.
At another level, the Will of God determines a certain backbone of commonality. Muslims fast at Ramadan (rather than everybody at different times) and pray toward Mecca (rather than any old direction), because it strengthens the spirit of togetherness. It is important that only a very few things are stipulated like this, instilling a sense of togetherness at the centre, whilst leaving a huge area for individual endeavour; for the extreme of togetherness is stifling conformity and mindless robotism that comes from blind copying, just as the other extreme of too little is anarchy, chaos and isolation.
An over-enthusiasm for an excessive imitation of details arises through a person's sense of insecurity and lack of understanding of what the vibrant, living Will of God is. They need to feel they are doing the Will of God, but because their heart neither recognises God nor perceives His Will, the only way they can feel they are doing the Will of God is to imitate others who they calculate are doing the Will of God. Unfortunately, this involves judging who is doing the Will of God, which can only be done if you know already. The idea of looking to the past, not only ignores all these matters mentioned, but also the fact that all we ever know of Muhammad and His Companions comes through the wholly unreliable channel of hadith and sunnah.
2007.07.25