Re: Egypt removes wahabi/salafi literature
Peace brother ajazali
True scholarship is hard and Sufis I associate with recognise that. True scholarship classifies material it does not remove it from existence. Sisi is just doing what the Salafis did with all the other literature. Sufis have nothing to do with this. I’m not in favour of hiding material - this is a good time to recall that I stopped studying with Salafis when I found out about all the abridged books they have out and their systematic boycotting of other books on the grounds (they allege) that they are flawed, fake or fabricated. Let us decide … through rigorous scholarship. I am not an advocate of lazy Sufism. We are instructed to learn as well and not all Sufis are the same. You should know that by now. If insecurity is the claim you wish to level then that insecurity should be leveled first at the people who did this first …
Now why is it so potent? It is because for the untrained minds the heavily pruned approach seems to be clean and correct. All the groups agree with the solid stuff - all the groups cannot possibly deny the mutawatir. So they got rid of everything else that had some degree of ambiguity and confusion, other parts are merely reinterpreted against the traditional lines - and hey presto you have an approach that is rooted in firm reference. However, the tree of knowledge is so heavily pruned by now that it resembles a pole. The beauty is removed from it and more often than not the mercy is culled from the Deen. The hard line approach is crisp and the banks don’t slope down gradually but end sharply into tall cliffs that if a person strays from will fall down.
The fitnah in this modern Islamic Protestantism is that for the high-schooler it looks pretty much fault free - which it is … but by being so fault free it also suffers a huge fault which cannot be seen - the missing parts … That huge fault is - that the essence or nature of the religion itself becomes something else. It is a Khawarij simplification.