I am still a Salafi: dialogue with the neo-Hanbalis and the modernists

The occurrence of mistakes in individuals and groups is unavoidable; no one denies this; this is human nature, and Salafists are not immune to it. Pointing out these errors, correcting them, and denying them to those who commit them does not invalidate the methodology in any way, but rather is one of the acts of enjoining good and forbidding evil.

But this is one thing, and what is happening with the repentant Salafist movement is something entirely different, and it has nothing to do with reformist criticism, “Rather, it is an attack that crossed all red lines of criticism, represented by criticizing the doctrinal fence, ruling regimes, and social axioms, as well as an attack on scholars who have served the Islamic state with great services, and an attempt to disdain them and remove them from the people’s eyes. And a call with such attributes would never bring fruitful fruit, just as grapes are not reaped from thorns!  The danger of such new calls is that they represent the true beginning of the materialistic modernist call, by claiming the sophistical view: the relativity of truth, as the postmodernists do, or the overthrow of scholars committed to the apparent Shari'ah, as the new Hanbalis do, so that the natural alternative for these people is either a final relapse and the modernist view, or that the spiritual alternative is the tendency to dervishism."