I’ve been meaning to write this article for some time now. The objective is not to convince others to leave Salafism, but to give perspective on how your understanding of Islam transforms with life experience and learning Islam. Also, there are those who wonder why I gradually shifted when I was studying abroad, but have never heard my side of the story. I have heard some believe my decision was emotional or I was brainwashed. Neither are true. It was a gradual decision based on knowledge, research & hours of reflection & thought.

The Building Blocks of the Journey

Let’s start at the very beginning. I grew up in a relatively non-practicing Pakistani family in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I occasionally would pray in my local masjid and had fond memories of it, but never understood any of the khutbahs or halaqahs because they were all in Arabic. I used to attend an international school where there was no Islamic Studies curriculum so I never studied Islam in a structured way. However, I had always been an avid reader, and besides fiction, I used to spend hours reading through encyclopedias my father had purchased for the family. Sometimes I would fall asleep on the floor reading volumes of the World Book. For you Gen Z kids, imagine a 30-volume book version of Wikipedia, organized alphabetically. This was the world before the internet. I’ve always loved reading & learning because of this effort of my father, may Allah preserve him, forgive him and guide him to goodness.

When I was in middle school, my parents hired an elderly Quran teacher to help me improve my reading & memorization of the Qur’an. Suddenly, when I was in 13 years old & in Grade 9, I learned that we were going to be moving to Canada. Before I left, my Qur’an teacher gifted me an English translation of Muhammad ibn Abdil Wahhab’s Kitab al-Tawhid. I didn’t know what it was though and didn’t read it. It stayed packed away in boxes for the next few years.

The First Extreme: Post-Colonial Immigrant Fantasy

When I moved to Canada, the same thing happened to me that happens to many – if not most immigrants to Canada from Muslim countries. The post-colonial, Hollywood-fueled fantasy of living in the West with white people finally became reality, and I soaked it in like a sponge. Islam became a faded memory, something I barely thought or spoke about in high school. As I neared graduation, I was barely hanging to any belief at all. All I cared about as a teenager was girls, video games, fitness and school. Ironically, although I went to a high school which had a very large Muslim population, the best influence on me in high school were my religious Christian friends. They encouraged me to be a better person and focus on self-improvement.

After I finally made it to university at the age of 17, the reality of life started to kick in, and I used to feel very stressed out about family issues & my grades. During this time I became a hardcore fitness enthusiast. I didn’t know it at the time, but I developed a very important intellectual skill here, which was to filter through the noise of uninformed opinion and find expert advice to follow for weightlifting & nutrition. The majority of people in the world of fitness & nutrition preach pseudoscience or personal experience as fact, and sorting through that nonsense takes quite a bit of digging. For example trainers who have advanced or doctoral degrees in sports physiology & nutrition and/or have decades of experience training athletes might not have the the most attractive or well-marketed content & information, but their advice is always grounded in scientific evidence, well-tested and frankly, works.

I still am not sure whether I fully left Islam in my first year of university, but there was a subconscious drift away from any previous religious or cultural identity I had to a purely desire-driven obsession with the dunya. I stopped attending Friday prayers for a few months. I thank Allah that I never committed zina or drank alcohol, but I came very close to partaking in these. At this point, Allah intervened & His decree of select events shook up my worldview.

Firstly, most of my Muslim friends started adopting an immoral lifestyle or outwardly left Islam. I saw it as petty and absurd and ended up always in conflict with them. Secondly, I noticed that I didn’t like the person I was becoming. I would make my mother quite upset at times, and I didn’t like myself when I did that. Thirdly, the lifestyle of desires & dunya wasn’t doing anything except filling me with emptiness. The people I was spending time with in my first year of university also seemed to think, feel & behave like empty husks, and at times the immoral activities they passionately endorsed or took part in made me disgusted. Lastly, in my second year I started taking courses on Cosmology & Evolutionary biology. I had become a lot more introspective and was seeking the truth about the universe. In what I can only describe as Allah’s protection, although the courses I were taking were implicitly encouraging atheism, they had the opposite effect on me. Learning about the Big Bang, multiverse theory & even evolutionary biology influenced me to start thinking about God more & at times even filled me with spiritual awe.

I started reading about Islam, and started with Islamic philosophy, books written by Seyed Hossein Nasr, Karen Armstrong etc. I would randomly search for information on the internet, and this is before there was any credible information online. I started leaning towards Qur’anism. It seemed quite simple & straightforward. As Muslims we obey & follow God and His book above all else.

The Second Extreme: Madkhalism

It was at this point that Salafism was taking off again in the West. There was a resurgence after it’s previous wave in the 90s). The first influence on me was popular Salafi preachers in the USA, which back then included Dr. Yasir Qadhi, who I took my first Aqidah course with in 2007. In the course he emphasized, as most Salafis do, the simplicity of early Islam & how Sufism, philosophy & kalam convoluted everything, are misguidance and bid’ah etc. Dr. Yasir was a classic Salafi at that point, and you can find his videos on YouTube explaining his own journey out of Salafism. The class flipped my view of Islam upside down. My understanding of Islam had to be shaped by the Qur’an & Sunnah, I couldn’t impose my own understanding onto it. At this point Internet forums were taking off as well. These were pre-social media comment threads for you Gen Z folks. Salafism was the most popular version of Islam on these forums. I started scouring these forums for learning Islam.

This clicked instantly with my memories from Saudi Arabia. I had witnessed what seemed to me a pure Islam, devoid of any cultural aberrations. I also had beautiful memories of Makkah & Madinah from my childhood.  It turned out that the most famous scholars who followed this understanding were those from Saudi Arabia. The connection of the two holy cities together with the belief that Saudi scholars were following the salaf was a powerful combination that was impossible to ignore. I found the book that my Qur’an teacher had gifted me in my childhood and was shocked to discover that it was Kitab al-Tawhid. I believed it was a sign from Allah that He had always wanted me to be guided on this path.

Almost immediately, I faced opposition in my newfound zealotry from immediate family. I became arrogant & hard-headed as a result. I thought it was because they were hypocrites, but I didn’t know back then that their concern was well-founded. It felt so obvious and black & white, I was on the truth, and they were on falsehood. Later in life, as I got closer to my 30s, I realized I was not running purely on Iman, but the zealotry of youth. I was just going to the opposite extreme & rebelling against the irreligiosity of my family & surroundings. This is not the same thing as learning & following the truth.

Young people are highly vulnerable to harmful, radical ideas, and there are many people out there who know this and want to manipulate them with that in mind. As someone who has taught teenagers & young adults for 14 years now, I now know this very well. As a general rule, folks who are sincere in their obligations towards the youth will try to enlighten them with structured knowledge. Those who have an agenda will instead fill their mind with angry & empty polemics.

The result was that in a span of a few weeks I transformed from a Muslim leaning towards Qur’anism into outright Madkhalism. I even took TROID summer classes (for those who are not aware, this is a local Canadian centre of old school Madkhalism). I ceased all my readings of Qur’anism & Islamic philosophy, but Islam was still simple for me. It was not just the Qur’an, but the Qur’an, Sunnah & the understandings of the Salaf. I read Kitab al-Tawhid, Sh. Al-Albani’s book The Prophet’s Prayer Described (which is pretty much an initiation ritual for becoming a Salafi), and Bilal Philips’ Evolution of Fiqh. The ummah had become weak and fallen into darkness because of the shirk & bid’ah of Sufis, Ash’aris & madhhabs. The legacy of Muhammad ibn Abdil Wahhab was the light & the correction to the errors of the madhhabs & Sufism.

When I returned to university after the summer of 2007, I had transformed into the ‘bid’ah police’. This is an embarrassing part of my personal history. I quickly earned a reputation for loudly, abrasively and condescendingly ‘correcting’ public problems I saw in the MSA, whether issues of bid’ah or general permissiveness.

This is why social media is so dangerous. A new Muslim, newly practicing or beginner student of knowledge should not be speaking publicly about Islam at all. You don’t know anything. You have a VERY long journey of learning ahead of you, and you SHOULD NOT be on a public platform. Learn Islam first BEFORE speaking. If I had social media at this point and started getting positive feedback from other Muslims who have no knowledge I would have been lost, destroyed and would likely have never seen the need to learn & progress further. False positive affirmation is destructive. We must guide & correct people to improve, not reinforce their erroneous or destructive beliefs & behaviors.

As my comments and character quickly became a problem, I received two important pieces of advice from good brothers that I respected. One was my tajwid teacher. He gently and kindly advised me on the problems with ‘groups’, and how every group has its correct & incorrect ideas and ways, and how with ‘groupthink’ we end up not seeing these problems, and how we should always seek the truth-in-between. This advice would stick with me for the rest of my life. The other was a brother who is now a researcher in theology. He was the most knowledgeable brother in the MSA at that time, and I respected him for it. He sternly corrected me in private, telling me that the way I was correcting problems was not wise and that I would end up driving Muslims aways from Islam, not to it. From these two advices, I realized that my heart was filled with arrogance. I needed to be open to learning & correction, and not think closed-mindedly that I was the only one who was right. As a result of these two advices, I abandoned Madkhalism and turned to a more ‘moderate’ Salafi approach.

For the next 3 years, until 2010, a year after university, I continued to focus on learning Islam in English. My father visited my tiny library of books, and upon realizing that I was focused on studying Islam & was not an arrogant, radical teenager anymore, encouraged me to keep learning. I spent any spare money I had on books, classes, and looked for local teachers to benefit from I started realizing that my heroes, such as Ibn Taymiyyah, ibnul-Qayyim, Muhammad ibn Abdil Wahhab & the Saudi scholars were all Hanbalis. I read whatever translations of works by them I could find. I read through the translation of Sh. Salih al-Fawzan’s Hanbali fiqh book al-Mulakhas al-Fiqhi in a few months and followed it diligently. I also took a class with a UK scholar who emphasized the importance of the madhhabs even for Salafis. Thus, I became a little more open to the idea of a fiqh madhhab, although I did not think of myself as being a Hanbali. As many neophyte Hanbalis do, I still thought I was following the Qur’an, Sunnah & way of the salaf. I started taking an interest in Usul-ul-Fiqh as I especially wanted to understand why my teachers were talking about Fiqh needing to adjust to the circumstances in the West. It was during this period that I read Hashim Kamali’s Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence & the translation of Ahmed al-Raysuni’s books on Maqasid al-Shariah.

In the first book I encountered my first contradiction in what I was being taught. My Salafi teachers were telling me to respect the Hanafi madhhab, but Hanafis differentiated between mutawatir & ahad hadith in fiqh. I had been taught that this was not the way of the salaf in Aqidah and that the origin of the mutawatir/ahad division was from the Mu’tazilah. Why was this a problem in theology but not in fiqh? I asked 3 of my teachers – all of them popular ‘celebrity scholars’ in the West who I will not list here, about this problem. All 3 of them, who I believed to reliable in fiqh or theology – said they didn’t know the answer to my question. I realized that these teachers were not as well-grounded in their knowledge as I thought they were. How could they be so passionate about Salafism but not know about this very important contradiction? I reflected on this question, but only briefly. It was clear that the answer to my question lay somewhere in Usul-ul-Fiqh, but that there was no way to learn more about this problem without learning Arabic & studying with true senior scholars abroad. Reading more about Usul-ul-Fiqh made it clear how I could not truly understand the Qur’an & Sunnah without the Arabic Language.

I started becoming more flexible about my fiqh views, realizing that much of what I thought was black and white was not so simple. If I had continued this path – knowing that Islam was more flexible than I thought, but not having the knowledge of Fiqh & Usul-ul-Fiqh to flesh out the limits of that flexibility, I think I would likely have ended up as some sort of anti-traditional modernist. However, in 2010 Allah blessed me & opened a way for me to move to & live in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It was a dream come true for a Salafi student of knowledge.

Moving to The Promised Land

Immediately upon arrival in Saudi Arabia, I was ecstatic. I felt like I had finally achieved a major goal in life. I had arrived in the ‘land of tawhid’ – as they call themselves. I began studying Arabic daily with a teacher who friends found for us. Because I had already realized the urgency of studying Arabic, I put my entire effort into learning the language and nothing else except for Qur’an & Tajwid. Together, we worked full-time in the mornings and went to Arabic class everyday. It was exhausting but rewarding. I started adding in reading practice in the mornings before work.  

My friends applied to Imam Muhammad ibn Saud University and got in. However, since I was getting married the next year, I held off on applying. The next year though, I quickly realized that I could get a lot more Arabic learning done without going to the university. With the help of Allah, my Arabic eventually improved enough to start attending public lessons with Saudi scholars. I attended lessons with Sh. Abdur-Rahman al-Barrak for the books of Muhammad ibn Abdil Wahhab, and studied all of al-Waraqat and Al-Aqidatul-Wasitiyyah with Sh. Fahd al-Ayban. I went to a few other lessons with other scholars and started studying Hanbali fiqh with Sh. Abdur-Rahman al-Zikri.

It was at this point that I met a young student of knowledge who was quite advanced in his studies in Saudi Arabia. He emphasized to me the importance of prioritizing the study of the works of classical scholars, and to not rely on the understandings of contemporary scholars as those were often weaker. The scholars of the past were more knowledgeable and had a stronger understanding of the religion. This made perfect sense. Why would you want to learn about what Sh. Ibn Uthaymin and Sh. Bin Baz said if you could study directly from the source, like Imam Ibn Taymiyyah and Imam ibnul-Qayyim? However, when I looked to my Saudi teachers, I noticed that they repeatedly would quote recent Saudi scholars as inspiration, or even give their own opinions. I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to learn what past scholars thought, not what these teachers’ own opinions were.

I was stuck. I wanted to learn from teachers who would focus on teaching me what scholars from the past said. By this point I was also beginning to grow weary of hearing the same names repeatedly. So far, I only knew what Imam Ahmed, Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibnul-Qayyim and Salafi scholars said. I realized that I barely knew any names of scholars from other madhhabs, let alone their books. I had already developed some respect for the Maliki madhab because of my readings in Usul-ul-Fiqh & Maqasid al-Shariah, but I couldn’t find any Maliki teachers. I had heard some positive comments made by my Saudi teachers about the Shafi’i madhhab and their books in Usul-ul-Fiqh, but I couldn’t find any Shafi’is around me either.

Dejected, I went to Hajj the same year and made dua to Allah to provide me with the best teachers. When I returned from Hajj, I complained to the same young student of knowledge about the lack of teachers who could teach me directly from the books of the scholars of the past. Although he had been hesitant before, he now immediately recommended two teachers to me. One was my teacher Sh. Khalil Mubarak (a Salafi), for Arabic grammar. The other was my teacher Sh. Abdul Fattah al-Ahsani, for Shafi’i Fiqh. However, he added a caveat for me: the Shafi’i fiqh teacher was an Ash’ari!

By this point, all I wanted to do was study a madhhab properly and broaden my knowledge of Islam, and I was willing to overlook this. Besides, I was only going to study fiqh with him, not Aqidah. I didn’t see why it would be a problem. Despite this, I was very worried about falling into bid’ah or some other problem in my faith, so I made istikharah before studying with him. Allah again opened doors and made my schedule malleable enough to study fiqh with him. This was clear evidence my istikharah was accepted by Allah. Thus, my journey into studying both the Arabic sciences & Shafi’i fiqh began. Here began the exodus from Salafism

From Salafi to Shafi’i

As I started studying Shafi’i fiqh, I began to deeply appreciate the traditional way of learning fiqh from fiqh-only texts. Although I was yet to learn evidences for the madhhab’s positions, I was learning a lot about fiqh. My teacher assured me that more advanced texts would be more thorough on the evidence (which is true – you don’t need to learn evidences in the beginning, rather you need to understand the legal concepts first). So, I kept going.

My first questioning of my Islamic worldview at that point, however, did not come from Shafi’i fiqh initially. Strangely, it came from learning the Arabic sciences, which had become a passion by this point. My teacher Sh. Khalil drilled into me the importance of the Arabic language and making it a priority before moving on to other studies. The text Qatr ul-Nada by Ibn Hisham al-Ansari for example, was the first text that I studied that had been written by a real polymath from the past. It was exhilarating seeing him weave seamlessly between Arabic grammar, Qur’anic recitations, Arabic poetry and deep, detailed explanations of grammar & language usage. I was so enamoured with the book that I accelerated my classes with my teacher to finish the second half of the book in two months.

When I returned to Canada the summer after finishing the book, it had become my benchmark at that point for what a real scholarly work was. I started looking for current scholars who could exemplify this kind of expert analysis & explanation. To my disappointment, I couldn’t find many prominent Salafi teachers, scholars or authors who had that level of skill – even though Ibn Hisham himself was a student of Ibn Taymiyyah. Too many of them seemed to be quoting Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn ul-Qayyim and Saudi scholars repeatedly with little depth. When I returned to Riyadh after that summer, I realized that it was in past scholars that I must continue to look for inspiration. I turned to my Shafi’i fiqh studies to look for these examples, and found many.

Not too long after, I began studying Fath-ul-Mu’in & a commentary on Jam’ ul-Jawami’ with my teacher. These are two intermediate-advanced texts in Shafi’i Fiqh & Usul. The former is written by Imam Zayn ul-Din al-Malaybari (d. 987 AH), and the latter commentary was written by Imam al-Mahalli (d. 864 AH).

In fiqh I started noticing serious contradictions between the Shafi’i madhhab and my Salafi views. I will mention a few examples here. Firstly, almost every scholar in Shafi’i history was Ash’ari, especially those who played a major role in the madhhab’s history, such as the Imams al-Juwayni, al-Ghazzali, al-Nawawi, al-Zarkashi, al-Haytami, al-Shirbini, al-Ramli & others, including Zayn-ul-Din al-Malaybari himself. Fath-ul-Mu’in was itself a remarkably erudite text, and I could not reconcile how scholars so meticulous in their knowledge and understanding could make serious mistakes in their Aqidah. Secondly, all the four madhhabs as I discovered, encouraged making dua at the grave of the Prophet ﷺ while making intercession with his status. This was a major impermissible bid’ah in Salafism. Another example was how fiqh rules on takfir & kufr were dependent on the person’s beliefs rather than their actions. One issue that troubled me was that Shafi’is said praying in a graveyard was disliked, not haram. I researched all these issues as much as I could. For example for that last ruling on praying in graveyards, I sat in my library – which was about 10-12 bookshelves large by this point – for around 6-8 hours to try and understand why they said it was disliked and not haram. I surprised to find out it had nothing to do with shirk, rather because of the impurities that emerge on the surface of the grave as the body decomposes. I tried to look in some of the earliest books of ikhtilāf such as by those of Ibn al-Mundhir and realized that it wasn’t until Imam ibn Taymiyyah that praying in a graveyard became such a controversial issue. All these contradictions troubled me, and what was even more troubling was that all these scholars had evidences for their positions. They were just interpreting the same verses & hadith in a different way from how modern-day Salafis were doing it.

In Usul-ul-Fiqh I became obsessed with the relationship between language, reason & fiqh. I began to be able to differentiate between proper scholarly usage of the Qur’an & Sunnah, and coupled with my continued studies in Arabic, noticed how ikhtilaf in interpreting a verse or hadith could occur just at the level of language and how easy it was to misunderstand or misinterpret a verse or hadith with insufficient language skill and inter-textual context. I began to realize that appeals to ‘following the Qur’an & Sunnah’ and ‘this is the correct opinion’ were more based on ignorance rather than knowledge. Anyone could quote the Qur’an & Sunnah and make the texts seem like they are supporting their position. What mattered more was not quoting the Qur’an & Sunnah for our positions itself, but HOW they were being used & WHOSE interpretation we were using. The Salafi argument of ‘our understanding is the only correct one because it is based on the Qur’an & Sunnah’ suddenly fell flat.

Moreover, I was continuing to study texts by scholars from the past who were Ash’ari/Maturidi or Sufi in their perspective but whose works were relied upon in non-theology subjects such as Imam al-Taftazani, Imam ibn Malik, Imam al-Jazari, Imam al-Suyuti, Imam al-Nawawi & others. Some books and classes – such as my classes in Tafsir ul-Jalalayn by my fiqh teacher’s uncle Sh. Abdur-Rashid al-Mawlawi, made me wonder how much time is wasted of students by incapable teachers who put themselves forward prematurely as authorities. For almost every verse in the Qur’an, this teacher brought up points in Usul-ul-Fiqh, grammar, rhetoric, morphology & fiqh, while the local Saudi Salafi scholar in tafsir – as beautiful a human being as he was – was himself in attendance because he realized that his PhD in tafsir didn’t match up to this very normal traditional way of learning & teaching tafsir.

I realized that I had only two options at this point. Either I believe that all these great Shafi’i scholars over Islamic History – including my own teachers – were mistaken and that modern Salafis – including myself – knew better than they did, or that I humble myself and realize that I was the one who was blinded by taqlid, not them.

It was time for a decision. I decided not to travel back home that summer. Instead I stayed behind in Riyadh and planned out a reading of 7 different books on the subject of bid’ah over two months. I had already become curious on the topic after reading that Imam al-Shafi’i himself said there are two types of bid’ah: good and bad. I wanted to understand how the scholars of the past understood it, not how Salafis did. The result of this was realizing that the majority position on bid’ah in Islamic History was the opposite of what I thought. Most scholars in Islamic History said that not all innovations are bad, and they relied on Qur’an & Sunnah as much as those who disagreed with them did. See here for a detailed summary about how the scholars of the Sunnah throughout history understood Bid’ah using evidence from the Qur’an & Sunnah.

It was clear to me at this point, that Islam is not always so simple. Yes, we follow the Qur’an & Sunnah as Muslims, but how the Qur’an & Sunnah are interpreted is not as straightforward as it seems. The phenomenon of ikhtilaf appeared early in Islamic History, and scholars developed intellectual & social systems to regulate them. Salafism was not eliminating ikhtilaf by telling everyone to go back to the ‘Qur’an & Sunnah’, rather it was attempting to strong-arm ikhtilaf to follow its own points of view, creating internal, self-destructive conflict in the ummah.

This was the final straw. After that summer I realized I couldn’t call myself a Salafi anymore. It made no sense to me to accept the Shafi’i madhhab as a valid madhhab in fiqh but then say that all the scholars in the madhhab were seriously misguided in their knowledge of the Creator Himself because they were Ash’ari in Aqidah. It made no sense to me be so radical about one understanding of bid’ah when it was the minority one. It made no sense to think that Najdi Salafism was the only truth when different groups of scholars of the Sunnah across Islamic History all understood the salaf & their legacy in different ways. I concluded that I would rather be safe & follow an understanding of the Qur’an & Sunnah that was held by a significant majority of scholars over Islamic History, instead of arrogantly or ignorantly sticking to one that only became common in the 1900s. At least this way I can tell Allah that I tried my best to follow the inheritors of the Prophets, and not my own desires or ignorance, or the misgivings of later centuries whose minds & hearts are polluted by modernity & all its evils.

What Comes After Salafism?

If I was not Salafi anymore, what was I? Was it time to become and Ash’ari & a Sufi? It was tempting, and I opened myself up to the world of the Ash’aris & Sufis, who I had previously kept far away from because I thought they were people of bid’ah & kufr. Unfortunately among Sufis I saw the same groupthink, taqlid & radicalism I had seen in Salafism. They are better though, as Ash’ari & Sufi scholars are on average much more capable and knowledgeable in the Islamic sciences than Salafi scholars. You can find exceptional Salafi scholars, but in my experience, this is not the general rule. While the average graduate of a traditional seminary will have studied an entire madhhab and the 6 books of a hadith (even if to a basic level), many Salafi scholars I have seen are more similar to preachers in their level of knowledge. This is my anecdotal observation; you don’t have to agree with me.

As I broadened my horizons, I met examples of people who were just as blinded by their own point of view as Salafis were. I met a senior Barelwi student of knowledge who, sitting in Riyadh, casually made takfir of all the ‘Wahhabis’ around him. I later remarked to him how I respected him for his knowledge but he was behaving no different than the Wahhabis he hated. I met other Sufis who insisted that now that I was out of Salafism, I must start using prayer beads & visit certain awliya’ & graves. I immediately chafed at these suggestions. I was pursuing the truth. I was not looking for another ‘side’ to join. It was clear that joining a new clique was not the answer, but more knowledge. I had to turn my energy & focus to understand Ash’arism & Sufism now.

My conclusions about Salafi groupthink was confirmed once again when I was invited to a class by Sh. Salih al-Fawzan by some well-meaning Salafi brothers at my workplace. They had raved to me earlier about how much knowledge and benefit they were getting from these classes. I had used to love Sh. Salih al-Fawzan before I left Canada, and had read not just his works in Fiqh mentioned before, but his explanation of Kitab al-Tawhid & others translations. When I attended the class, I was surprised by how simple and basic his classes were. The fiqh class was on a lower level than the first text I had studied in Shafi’i Fiqh, and the tafsir class was him just paraphrasing the Qur’an in very basic, easy words. Of course, this is not a problem in itself when you are teaching raw beginners. However, when I got back to work the next day, the brothers exclaimed how awesome the class was and if I had witnessed how deep the knowledge of the Sheikh was. I replied how it was not like that at all & was very basic & simple in comparison to the scholars of the past. They were at a loss for words. I didn’t want to cause any problems so I didn’t push further, but it was clear to me that this was just another example of blind taqlid & groupthink.

Although I wanted to keep pursuing the truth with my studies, Allah’s Qadr set in, and I had to leave Saudi Arabia in 2016 due to severe illness. With Allah’s permission, I had accomplished a lot in 6 short years, but I had sacrificed my physical & mental health to do it. You can read about that here.

Back in Canada, it was clear to me now that true scholarship required a level of expertise that is not accessible in Saudi Arabia. One can find great scholars in the country (who are often a lot more open-minded and not hard Salafis) but they are usually teaching Masters & PhD students and don’t have time to teach privately. I had realized by now – from buying & reading books from scholars around the world in the international book fair that came to Riyadh annually – that the Muslim world everywhere had knowledge, even more than Saudi Arabia. Al-Azhar & its history had sparked my adoration, so I decided to travel to Egypt. Again, due to the blessings of Allah, I had already established contact with teachers & students in Cairo and could hit the ground running, so to speak.

After the summer, I traveled once again to Cairo, and it was here that I focused on studying Hadith & Maturidi Aqidah. Cairo was a breath of fresh air in that its scholarship is more open minded & erudite than most places in the Muslim world. After all, Azhari scholars were the ones who established the curriculums in Saudi universities. To this day I consider al-Azhar to be among the best institutions in the Muslim world that someone can study. My own experience with teachers from that system confirmed this. When I meet someone who has studied for a long time with Azhari scholarship, I always hold them in high regard. After Cairo, I returned to Canada, and have been conducting heavy research into Kalam, Sufism & philosophy ever since, along with teaching Islamic Studies full-time.

As for Salafism, I have no problem with people doing taqlid of Imam ibn Taymiyyah, Imam ibnul-Qayyim and even modern-day Saudi scholars. If you sincerely believe these are the most reliable scholars to follow and are closest to the Qur’an and Sunnah, then you should follow them. However, it is incorrect and dangerous to believe that they are the only ones on the truth. You must embrace the fact that there is ikhtilaf. You cannot call Muslims who are following other scholars of the Sunnah (who are the majority) people of innovation or make takfir of them, just because they differ on issues like kalam, bid’ah & tasawwuf, If you do, you are going against the majority of the ummah’s scholars, and that is the very definition of going against Ahlus-Sunnah, hizbiyyah, and eventually Kharijism. This is also why I cannot accept Muhammad ibn Abdil Wahhab. He was free to disagree and preach against he saw as incorrect in the Muslim world. His takfir of the majority of Muslims was bad enough, but his endorsement of violence against Muslims who disagreed with him on issues of ikhtilaf is criminal.  

I do not regret or look down on my Salafi past however. It was Allah’s Qadr. I learned a lot of good things from Salafism, such as prioritizing evidence over personal opinion, the importance of Aqidah & Tawhid, the value of the Sunnah, wariness of harmful innovations in religion, that scholars & knowledge are of paramount importance, and that following the example of the salaf is important. Salafism and ‘following the salaf’ are two different things, and only those who learn will be able to distinguish between the two. The first is just one interpretation of the salaf, but there are multiple interpretations to the latter. I still love Salafi scholars (actual scholars, not preachers), including those who were my teachers. I will always work with them for a good cause, even If I disagree with them. Even if they go against what I believe, they arrived at their conclusions with the requisite knowledge & learning to do so. This will always be the case as long as they do not fall into the trap of labelling the majority of the ummah’s scholars as people of innovation or make takfir of Muslims. I don’t know how I can love & work with someone who thinks myself and a millenium of scholarship of the Sunnah are doomed to Hell? At that point, its not about Salafism, its about the principle of respecting the inheritors of the Prophets.

Besides no longer thinking of myself as a Salafi, but neither do I think of myself as a card-carrying Maturidi, Ash’ari, Sufi or anything similar either. I believe (and have seen) that anyone who learns deeply & broadly, and resists uncritical & popular taqlid will end up with the same mindset. Some of my views are in the Maturidi, Ash’ari & Sufi spectrum, but some of my students are surprised to find out that I hold some Salafi & Athari views too. I’m just a Muslim, trying my best to follow the Qur’an, Sunnah according to the understanding of scholars whose knowledge, understanding & piety was broadly attested to by the scholars & Muslims throughout Islamic History.  My understanding of ‘what is the true Islam’, is based on this last sentence. If you want to read my current views of what Ahlus-Sunnah wal-Jama’ah are, read this article.

A Summary of Major Lessons I Learned From this Journey

I will summarize here some of they most important lessons I learned in my journey of learning:

• Knowledge is the key to understanding Islam properly. If you don’t learn Islam, you will never understand Islam. It’s as simple as that.
• The salaf are definitely the best generations of Muslims that we should follow, but interpreting their legacy is not that simple.
• There are thousands of scholars in Islamic History. Its quite simple. If you only know the names or views of a handful, you don’t know what scholars actually thought.
• Pursue knowledge, and its people will become known to you. Never attach yourself to personalities. That’s what cults do, not truth seekers. Muslims are truth-seekers. The Prophet SAW was not followed because of his personality only, but rather that his truthfulness was borne witness to by the Qur’an & miracles.
• Always aim to follow the truth, no matter what it is or where you find it. Don’t fall into groupthink & be fanatic about anyone or any movement’s positions. The truth is often somewhere in the middle of all the chaos of voices out there.
• If you avoid certain scholars & books because their views are ‘bid’ah’, you will never step outside your bubble. The truth may be outside your bubble, but your fear to step outside of it is holding you back.
• Learn to live & be content with scholarly ikhtilaf that is outside your comfort zone. This ummah is being destroyed by its bickering and in-fighting on issues of legitimate ikhtilaf.
• Anyone can quote the Qur’an & Sunnah to make their point. Anyone can claim to be following the Qur’an & Sunnah while others are not. These statements are meaningless. Study the Qur’an & Sunnah properly – Arabic language, Usul-ul-Fiqh, Hadith sciences, Fiqh, Tafsir etc if you want to really to understand what the Qur’an & Sunnah are saying. At the very least, you should have the Arabic down.
• Read the great books of the Islamic tradition, and you will learn to recognize what real scholarship is. Then you can use that as a barometer to assess the claims of scholarship by others.

If you have any lessons from my story (or your own to share), please comment below!