Dawud Adib: letting it eat away?
An evil man in the community | Peace, Bruv
The "evil man" in question is Dawud Adib, the African-American "salafi" preacher, who delivered a lecture some weeks ago at a "salafi" conference in New Jersey in response to Umar Lee's series of articles, The Rise and Fall of the Salafi Da'wah in America. The first part of the lecture has been published on YouTube (no picture, just audio with a caption), and lasts more than an hour. Umar Lee published a response in his own video, in which he calls Dawud Adib's claims "lies" and without foundation, and makes some observations about the history of Adib's movement and its destructive influence on the Muslim community. (More: Peace, Bruv.)
Dawud Adib is quite vituperative about Umar Lee, calling him a "shaytaan" and, later on, a "criminal". His main thrust is to prove that the "salafi da'wah" did not start in the USA in the 1990s, as Umar supposedly claims in his series, but was present in the USA as far back as the late 1950s and was present when he (Dawud) converted in the 1970s, and embraced it very quickly. He also states that there were "salafi" conferences in the 1980s, albeit addressed by people he would no longer call "salafis" because they have fallen out in a big way, such as Ja'far Shaikh Idris, Abdul-Rahman Abdul-Khaaliq, Idris Palmer and others. Actually, Umar Lee did not say that there had been no "salafi" presence before the 1990s; what he said that, as a mass movement among working-class and particularly African Americans, that is when it was first seen.
It begs the question of why Dawud Adib has waited this long to deliver a lecture of more than an hour at a "salafi" conference in response to Umar's articles. He could have responded in writing, in public or otherwise, in 2007 when the series was first published. Do they have nothing better to do at a "salafi" conference, like teaching something to do with Islam itself for example? It makes them look rather a petty-minded group of people, still stuck in the conflicts of the late 1990s and still looking for people to refute. He doesn't actually attempt to refute the factual claims Umar makes; indeed he laughably alleges that Umar must have got his facts from "the feds", when the articles are hardly meticulously detailed — the section on New Jersey would only come to a couple of pages of A4 — and could have come from talking to anyone who had been in the places mentioned; the "inquisition" which Adib's group conducted was partly conducted over the Internet, and anyone could view the two sites which promoted much of it, which are both still going.
Adib also falls into the typical "salafi" practice of using verses and hadeeths which clearly refer to non-Muslims and hypocrites and interpreting them as referring to Muslims they disagree with; so, the Prophet's (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) prayer to "keep my heart firm on your [Allah's] religion" is interpreted as meaning "on our tiny little micro-sect" and the speech is peppered with repetitions of that prayer next to refererences to various people that have fallen out with his clique, and the minority among the Saudi ulama who support them, over the years. A hadith which refers to people with "upside-down hearts", referring to the hypocrites (i.e. people who pose as Muslims when they are not), is interpreted as meaning people who have left his sub-division of "salafiyya". And so on.
It's pathetic. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I remember going to mawlids in and around London and hearing at least one lecture at each of them about why we should be celebrating the mawlid, in one case shouted (as if the imam was talking to opponents of the mawlid), when everyone present had come to do just that, and I remember the tedium of hearing a variant on that lecture year after year. So many "salafi" websites still have refutation material featured very prominently, often more so than anything else — TROID, for example, has "manhaj" as the third item in their menu, and much of the material is directed against other "salafis". It's a depressing sight, when other Muslims moved on years ago.
