um false. salafiyyah started in saudi arabia and spread to the muslim world via saudi arabia. it will be dead soon or in the decline if even the founders are rejecting it
Who do Salafi scholars quote all the time?
Sheikh Ibn Taymiyyah. Salafi scholars probably cite Sheikh Ibn Taymiyyah more than they cite Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab.
Sheikh Ibn Taymiyyah was a Salafi scholar. Even Ibn Jawzi- if you read Devil's Deception by him, he today would be called a "Wahhabi".
The reality is that denouncing bid'ah such as mawlid and praying to saints is not some radical concept that Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab invented.
It is blatantly obvious that we have no business praying to saints and that mawlid is a bid'ah.
The Sufis take advantage of illiterate, semi-literate elements living in rural villages in the Muslim world. If you have a person living in desperate poverty who cannot spell his name in the language he uses every day, much less read the Quran- yes, you may be able to convince him that praying to saints is part of Islam.
But suppose he has a son. He wants desperately for his son to get an education. His son goes to college, gets an education and is now an educated person. What is going to happen? I believe there are numerous such cases where he turns against his father's "folk religion" understanding of Islam and wants to turn to the authentic Islam as practiced by the earliest Muslims.
The reality is it is impossible to win against Salafis. It is kind of like the Marxist theory of revolution- even if you crushed all the Marxist revolutionaries, new Marxist revolutionaries will arise organically from the working class. Well- that is ridiculous because Marxism isn't an authentic expression of the working class. But Salafiyyah really would work sort of like that.
Even if you captured and beheaded me, suppressed all the Salafis, genocided all the Arabs and indoctrinate all the Muslim world with Sufism- some Muslim with some education is going to say "wait a minute.... there's nothing in this kitab about praying to saints". And another "Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab" will arise.
And it's no coincidence that so many Arabs are believers in Salafiyyah and Salafiyyah's stronghold basically is amongst the Arabs. I knew an Eritrean who complained that some local "Ethiopian" food was not authentic. If I eat Chinese food, I'm not going to know or care if it's authentic. But it would make sense that Chinese would be more concerned about that. The Arabs were the first to embrace Islam. It makes sense that Arabs would be the most concerned about preserving its authenticity.
