The Verification of the Attribution of Salafiyyah to the Era before Ibn Taymiyyah

The most significant claim of the Salafiyyah School for self-legitimization is the attribution to ḥadīth scholars before Ibn Taymiyyah’s life and al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ in general. The main problem of this article is to explore the validity of this claim and verify it through the comparison of the five instances of the most important intellectual characteristics of Ibn Taymiyyah and ḥadīth scholars, as well as their commonalities and differences. Previous research mostly approached the belief or historical foundations of the Salafiyyah; while comparing the most important characteristics of Ibn Taymiyyah’s views and ḥadīth scholars’ thinking, and expressing their commonalities and differences, this article reveals the crisis of the legitimacy of the Salafiyyah. Except for a few commonalities, the differences are often so broad that Salafism cannot be attributed to the era before Ibn Taymiyyah. Ibn Taymiyyah believed in man’s pluralism of reason and preserved the basis of his narrativeism in words and interpretations by giving priority to the Sharia-supporting reason over the opposing reason. But ḥadīth scholars, due to the lack of texts, turned to analogy and other rational methods. Ibn Taymiyyah considered the understanding of the predecessors (aslaf) in terms of discovery and reference a source of legislation, while ḥadīth scholars did not find the predecessors’ consensus a source of legislation. Unlike his predecessors, Ibn Taymiyyah accepted the soul’s life after death but ignored its requirements. In his view, intercession, recourse, and pilgrimage were examples of polytheism. He denied the infallibility of the prophets and the virtues of Amīr al-Muʾminīn (as) and Ahl al-Bayt (as), and he was the revivalist of the extreme spectrum of ḥadīth scholars (ʿUthmānism).