The Ruling on Calling Oneself a Salafi and the Response to Those Who Deny It and Argue with the Saying of Allah the Exalted: “It is He who has named you Muslims”

The Shaykh : ... Some of them say, “Does it not suffice for us to call ourselves by what our Lord of the Worlds named us in His Noble Book, saying simply that we are Muslims?” My answer to this objection is that it suffices, but when will it suffice? It will suffice when all Muslims return to the way of our earliest predecessors (Salaf) upon the Book and the Sunnah, and when there are no longer schools of jurisprudence that continue to assert their existence today and are adopted by millions of Muslims of differing schools and inclinations. When Muslims agree upon this methodology of returning to the Book and the Sunnah and upon the methodology of the righteous Salaf, as we have said, then all these names will be lifted, not only “Salafi,” but before “Salafi,” the designations of Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali, Zaydi, Shi'i, Ibadi, Khariji, Naqshbandi, and so on, will be lifted. When Muslims agree to abandon all these names, the difference is very great between these names and the name “Salafi,” and this difference must be pointed out. As we explained previously, a Salafi is one who attributes himself to the Salaf, and the Salaf is not an affiliation to a specific person, even if that person were Abu Bakr, 'Umar, or 'Uthman, but rather to all the Salaf. Meanwhile, these other schools are affiliations to individuals. There is a vast difference between this affiliation and that affiliation. That Salafi affiliation is an attribution to infallibility, because the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) said: Therefore, following the way of the righteous Salaf is a matter of consensus and is protected from error. However, following the school of any of the imams of the Muslims, no matter how high his status in knowledge, character, righteousness, and asceticism, does not mean adhering to infallibility, for he errs and hits the mark, as we mentioned earlier regarding Imam al-Shafi'i: “There is no one but that a Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) is hidden from him...” and so on. The point is, as long as these names exist, and they indicate things that are not prescribed, such as fanaticism for a person who is not infallible, we do not see any reason whatsoever to be lenient or to relinquish the attribution to the righteous Salaf. And I do not say of myself that I am a Salafi because I found myself in an era where one must attribute oneself to one of these schools. Some people say, “Say you are a Muslim, my brother, you, and do not hold me to account; you are like the ostrich, that large bird which is cited as an example of foolishness. When it sees the hunter, they claim, it puts its head in, so it does not see the hunter, and in its foolishness it imagines that the hunter no longer sees it. It is as large as the camel that says, ‘You, say you are a Muslim,’ closing its eyes to the existing reality today. If I say I am a Muslim, they will ask me, ‘Are you a Hanafi? Are you a Shafi'i? Are you such-and-such, such-and-such, such-and-such?’ Names that cannot be counted. So what do you say if you insist on saying only ‘I am a Muslim’? It means you have not declared your creed. It means the right and the wrong have been mixed up, and the truth and the falsehood have been mixed up, when you say of yourself only ‘I am a Muslim.’ Well, if a person says, ‘I am a Muslim in terms of religion, but there is no objection to attributing something else to clarify the reality, and that is: I am a Syrian Muslim. What is wrong with that? What is the attribution? Syrian is a country I migrated to. I am an Albanian Muslim, meaning by birth. What is wrong with that? There is no boasting in it or anything, but it is a clarification of the reality. So if I say I am a Salafi, meaning I attribute myself to acting upon the Book and the Sunnah according to the methodology of the righteous Salaf, what is wrong with that except boasting, if it were permissible for a Muslim to boast with such an attribution for that reason.