Salafiyyah: It isn’t a sect, movement or ideology.
It is going back and re-establishing the primordial message, the Message that our Prophet SAW spread, the one unalloyed and unfiltered. He (SAW) explicitly stated we should follow his generation and the following two after:
Abdullah ibn Mas’ud reported: The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “The best people are those of my generation, then those who come after them, then those who come after them. Then, there will come people after them whose testimony precedes their oaths and their oaths precede their testimony”.
Why, then, is there a fixation on innovation?
Without having a reference point for keeping the purity of our Religion, the Christians and Jews is the greatest example of the outcome. Therefore, as stated in Khutbah’s every Friday:
The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, would praise Allah in his sermon, as He deserves to be praised, and then he would say, “Whomever Allah guides, no one can lead him astray. Whomever Allah sends astray, no one can guide him. The truest word is the Book of Allah and the best guidance is the guidance of Muhammad. The most evil matters in religion are those that are newly invented, for every newly invented matter is an innovation, every innovation is misguidance, and every misguidance is in the Hellfire.”
This goes with every ideology/theory/belief system: The label doesn’t matter, what matters is what it contains. As Shakespeare said in Romeo & Juliet: What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.” So if you go by Salafi, a Muslim, Sunni, Islamist, your madhab, etc its academic. What matters is your reference is Qur’an and the Sunnah with the methodology of the first 3 generations as our Prophet SAW explicitly stated and free from Bid’ah.