An excerpt taken from "Ibn Taymiyyah and The Occult Origins of the Salafi Movement" by David Livingstone. Despite the horrors associated with “Shariah,” those instances represent aberrations perpetrated by radical factions of the religion created specifically to malign the reputation of Islam. With the increase of her power through her colonial possessions, Britain sought to undermine the great power of the time, the Islamic empire of the Ottoman Turks. To pursue their infamous strategy of Divide and Conquer, by creating rivalries within the Empire, the British needed the opportunity to rewrite the laws of Islam in order to create competing interpretations. However, due to a process known as the Closing of the Doors of Ijtihad, the outstanding achievement of Islamic law, which was formulated as a communal project over three centuries, was cordoned off from corruption. Four major schools of interpretation had been established, known as Maddhabs. Each Muslim was required to follow one of these four schools, a practice known as Taqlid, and it was no longer permitted to re-open the debate, known as Ijtihad, as all pressing questions were unanimously deemed to have been settled. Therefore, after a thousand years of remaining unchallenged, the sanctity of Ijtihad was challenged for the first time, beginning in the seventeenth century, by a legion of “Revivalist” Islamic reformers. All had in common, like the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, secret ties with the British and an emphasis on the precedent of a controversial thirteenth century scholar named Ibn Taymiyyah, in support of their innovations. Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Wahhabis and Revivalists have managed to commandeer Islam, such that the traditions of classical tradition, represented by Maddhabs, have been nearly entirely forgotten, and Ibn Taymiyyah (1263 – 1328) is now regarded as one of the great scholars of Islamic history and has gone on to inspire the most wayward distortions of Islam in our time.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 19:26:10 +0000
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