Points of Agreement and Disagreement Between the Salafi Call and the Party-Based Approach

The Shaykh : We agree with all the parties on one fundamental reality, but we differ in the detailed method of the call to it and the means to achieve it. We all agree that it is obligatory for Muslims to resume Islamic life; this is a point of common ground between us and them. We all say: it is obligatory that we resume Islamic life. But I am now asking, within the limits of what we used to read about their societies and what we read now embodied in these lines before us: Who represents the Muslim society? Is it only a few counted individuals in every region and every country, or is it these Muslims, from the scholar to the student to the illiterate who cannot read or write? There is no doubt that the latter answer is the one that represents the Muslim society.
So if we truly want to cooperate in resuming Islamic life, does this require that we divide people into two groups? One group we educate with the correct culture, which, by this writer’s admission, contains nothing but the Salafi call, and the other group, which is the larger one, we leave as they are? This means that we first leave them in ignorance; because as long as we call the first group, which is the elite and distinguished group of Muslims, to follow the truth—namely, the Book and the Sunnah—and we do not call the general public, that means we leave them in their ignorance and their error, and indeed in their misguidance.
And it is not only this; rather, we leave them in their differences and their severe disputes, one of the effects of which is that many of them are hesitant to pray behind their Muslim brother on the pretext that his school of jurisprudence differs from mine. Even today, you find this matter apparent in the refusal of many followers, or rather imitators, of the schools of jurisprudence who call for following the Book and the Sunnah to pray behind them. This is a phenomenon we see on many, many occasions. When these people are asked: Are the Salafis disbelievers? They say: No, they are innovators. Well, is it permissible in the school of jurisprudence to pray behind an innovator or not? It is permissible. And they cite a hadith that we consider weak in terms of its chain of narration, but sound in terms of its meaning; which is: "Pray behind every righteous person and every open sinner." So they narrate this hadith and then contradict it and do not act upon it, while all the schools of jurisprudence are based on it.