Senior Saudi Salafi Cleric: 'ISIS Is A True Product Of Salafism'

Senior Saudi Salafi Cleric: 'ISIS Is A True Product Of Salafism' HT: Memri.

"ISIS is a true product of Salafism, and we must deal with it with full transparency." 

This statement was made not by liberal Muslim elements, who regularly criticize Salafism, but by Sheikh 'Aadel Al-Kalbani, former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and a Salafi himself, hence its importance. 

Al-Kalbani is not the first Salafi to come out against ISIS – other Saudis have condemned the organization's conduct and operations – but Al-Kalbani has gone farther in his criticism: he has come out against the principles of the Salafi perception from which ISIS and its ilk draw, and has called for a rationalistic approach to Islam's distant past and what it means for Islam today instead of a blind reenactment of it.

In two articles in the Saudi government daily Al-Riyadh, Al-Kalbani criticized elements in the Salafi stream for appropriating the truth and Islam and for permitting the killing of their opponents, and likewise criticized clerics and society that dared not come out against them. 

He stated that the call to blindly reenact the path of the Prophet Muhammad and of the forefathers of Islam stems from a faulty grasp of the essence of this path, and that Muhammad himself had rejected blind adoption of the perceptions of the past and blind following of the path of his predecessors, choosing instead a rationalistic approach appropriate for a changing reality. 

Al-Kalbani stated that clerics must take their heads out of the sand and move with the spirit of the times instead of rejecting and condemning any new idea.

This is not the first time that Al-Kalbani has challenged the mainstream Saudi clerics. He has harshly attacked suicide bombings, [1] published a fatwa permitting poetry,[2] and called for allowing women to drive cars.[3]

The following are translated excerpts from his two recent articles in Al-Riyadh. Read the full story here.

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