Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī

Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī (1914–1999) was one of the most influential Salafi scholars in the 20th century. He sought to reform Islam by requiring Muslims to return a puritanical and literalist approach toward scripture. Albānī moved from Albania to Damascus with his family as a child, and his father became a leading Ḥanafī scholar in the Albanian Muslim community in Syria. From a young age, Albānī disagreed with his father and the Albanian Ḥanafī community. He rejected their allegiance to the Ḥanafī school of law and instead advocated a strict adherence to the Qurʾān and Sunna. His scholarly career was full of tug-of-war battles with traditional jurists over the validity of following a madhhab and particular principles of Islamic legal theory. His legal scholarship contains many unconventional opinions, and he was therefore taken most seriously in the field of ḥadīth, not fiqh. A distinctive aspect of Albānī’s legacy is his constant effort to reevaluate the authenticity of ḥadīth. He sifted through thousands of ḥadīths and reevaluated them using traditional ḥadīth methodology