In China, the Hui Salafi sect, and its links with Saudi Arabia, have a long and complex history.
By Mohammed Al-Sudairi
The Diplomat - October 23, 2014
Salafism, or Salafiyya, is a doctrinal-intellectual current within
Islam that espouses a return to the ways of the Salaf As-Salih (the
Pious Ancestors), the first three generations of Muslims who lived
during and after the death of the Prophet Mohammed. Often described as
being rooted in the works of the medieval scholars Ibn Hanbal and Ibn
Taymiyyah, Salafism seeks to establish a more “authentic” religious
experience predicated on a presumably correct reading of the Quran and
the sunnah (the sayings and practices of the Prophet) and away from the supposed bid’ah (innovations) and heretical practices that have “polluted” it.
This current moreover embraces to a certain extent a rejection of the madhhab
(legal school) Sunni traditions that had emerged in Islam’s early
centuries. As a relatively modern phenomenon building on the Sunni
orthodox revivals of the 18th century, the failures of traditional
Muslim authorities to contend with mounting internal and external
challenges, as well as the spread of new modernistic discourses,
Salafism found a popular following across many Muslim societies in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its growth was facilitated by Saudi
Arabia – which embraced its own idiosyncratic brand of Salafism rooted
in the mid-18th century religious revivalism that swept central Arabia
(usually denoted by its detractors as Wahhabism after its “founder”
Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab) – especially after its annexation of Mecca
and Medina in 1924-25, and the subsequent influx of oil wealth, which
endowed the country with the religious authority and means
(universities, charities, organizations, preachers, and communicative
mediums) to promote this current globally.
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