The Salafis and Their Kalam, Kalam, Kalam....

Sidi Abdullah bin Hamid Ali has posted two very worthwhile 'aqida-related articles on the Lamppost Productions website. One is entitled The Speech and Word of Allah (Kalam): In Light of Traditional Discussions, and it discusses the issue of Kalam Allah and the uncreatedness of the Qur'an. Of special interest in this article is the inclusion of some statements by a couple of noted "Salafi" scholars in which they speculate about Kalam Allah and it's relationship to His essence, attributes, and actions—thus ironically engaging in the kalam (a.k.a. speculative theology) that they so often condemn in rather absolute terms.

The other new text is Abu Hanifa, Salafis, Al-Fiqh Al-Akbar, and The Truth, and in this one Sidi Abdullah takes on the "Salafis" head-on and demonstrates that in some cases, they're conveniently trying to have their cake and eat it too. Not only do the "Salafis" adhere to some convenient double-standards when it comes to the question of the attributive authority of al-Fiqh al-Akbar and Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari's al-Ibaanah, but they add words to the words of the Salaf in order to impose their own anthropomorphic views on them...and may Almighty God save us from all that.

In my mind, all of this just confirms what Shaykh Abdal-Hakim Murad asserts in Contentions 8, which is that Salafism is "an unsuccessful flight from complexity". Ouch!

It was a pleasure finding both of these articles, and I've taken the liberty to convert The Speech and Word of Allah article to Adobe Acrobat format, since downloading Microsoft Word files usually makes me a bit nervous.

Deen On...