In Shah Wali Allah’s day, two great camps of Sunni thought contended with one another: those we might term the Sunni traditionalists, who believed that the institutions of the triad heritage of the madhhabs, speculative theology and Sufi orders represented the true embodiment of Islam; and the iconoclastic ‘Salafi’ revivalists, who called for bypassing what they considered rigid and often misguided traditions to return to the Qur’an and Hadiths, the pure Islam of the Prophet’s community.
