section_path: Contemporary Ashʿarī – Salafī relations
section_name: Contemporary Ashʿarī – Salafī relations
paragraph_text: Contemporary Ashʿarī – Salafī relations
  
  Since the second half of the 20th century, there have been fierce clashes within the Sunni camps between Ashʿarites on the one hand and Salafiyya on the other, who exclude each other from Sunnism. In Indonesia, the Ashʿarite scholar Sirajuddin Abbas (d. 1980) wrote several books in the 1960s in which he explicitly excluded the Ahl as-salaf from Sunnism. Among other things, he argued that there was no Salafi madhhab in the first 300 years of Islam. From this he deduced that those who called other Muslims to obey the Salafi madhhab, were promoting a madhhab which did not even exist. In his view, only the Ashʿarites were real Sunnis. Abbas' books served as the theological basis for anti-Salafist campaigns in Aceh in 2014. During these campaigns, various Salafist schools in Aceh were closed by the provincial government.
  
  The Permanent Committee for Scholarly Research and Ifta in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa in 1996 stating that Salafis are Sunnis. Like many Ashʿarites, the Salafis believe their teachings are the only true form of Sunnism, and hence reject the Asharites and Maturidites as part of Sunnism. An example is the Saudi scholar Muhammad Ibn al-ʿUthaimīn, who in his 2001 published commentary on Aqīda Wāsiṭīya by Ibn Taimiyya expressed the opinion that Ash'arites and Māturīdites would not count among the Sunnis, because their doctrine of attributes would be in contrast to the doctrine of Muhammad and his companions. For this reason, the view that three groups belong to Sunnism should also be rejected. Sunnis are only those who are salaf in terms of belief.
  
  The accusation by some Wahhabis that the Ashʿarites were not Sunnis was subject of a fatwa by the "Egyptian Fatwa Office" in July 2013. In its fatwa, the office rejected this accusation, affirming that the Ashʿarites still represented the "multitude of scholars " (jumhūr al-ʿulamāʾ), and stressed out that they were the ones who in the past rejected the arguments of the atheists (šubuhāt al-malāḥida). Anyone who declares them to be unbelieving or who doubts their orthodoxy should fear for their religion. On the same day, the fatwa office made clear in a fatwa that, according to their understanding, the Ahl as-Sunna wa-l-jama only refer to those Muslims who are Ashʿarites or Maturidites.
  
  The rivalry between Ashʿarīyya and Salafiyya became visible again at the two Sunni conferences in 2016, which were directed against the terror of the IS organization. The first conference with the title "Who are the Ahl al-Sunna wa al-jama?" took place in the Chechen capital Grozny in August 2016 under the patronage of Ramzan Kadyrov. Numerous religious figures from Egypt, India, Syria, Yemen and the Russian Federation took part, including Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of the Azhar, and Sheikh Aboobacker Ahmed, the Grand Mufti of India. According to its organizers, the conference should "mark a blessed turning point in efforts to correct the serious and dangerous distortion of religion by those extremists trying to usurp the venerable name of Ahl al-Sunna wa-al-Jama'a, him to coin exclusively on itself and to exclude its true representatives from it." In the final declaration the Salafis and Islamist groups like Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, etc. and the Takfiri organisations like ISIL were excluded from Sunni Islam. In response to this, various prominent Salafiyya figures held a counter-conference in Kuwait in November 2016 under the title "The Correct Meaning of Sunnism" (al-Mafhūm aṣ-ṣaḥīḥ li-ahl as-sunna wa-l-jama), in which they also distanced themselves from extremist groups, but at the same time insisted that Salafiyya was not only part of Sunnism, but represented Sunnism itself. The conference was chaired by Ahmad ibn Murabit, Grand Mufti of Mauritania. A few days later, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed el-Tayeb publicly distanced himself from the final declaration of the Grozny conference, reiterating that he had not participated in it and stressed that he naturally viewed the Salafists as Sunnis.