Movements claiming to reject legal schools still practice undeclared partisanship of one.

Evidence

The Syrian-Albanian Salafi Muhaddith Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani (d. 1999) publicly challenged the foundational methodologies of the neo-Wahhabite establishment. According to Albani, although Wahhabis doctrinally professed exclusive adherence to the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Ijma of Salaf al-salih; in practice they almost solely relied on Hanbali jurisprudence for their fatwas—acting therefore as undeclared partisans of a particular madhab. As the most prominent scholar who championed anti-madhab doctrines in the 20th century, Albani held that adherence to a madhab was a bid’ah (religious innovation). Albani went as far as to castigate Ibn Abd al-Wahhab as a “Salafi in creed, but not in Fiqh”. He strongly attacked Ibn Abd al-Wahhab on several points; claiming that the latter was not a mujtahid in fiqh and accused him of imitating the Hanbali school. Albani’s outspoken criticism embarrassed the Saudi clergy, who finally expelled him from the Kingdom in 1963 when he issued a fatwa permitting women to uncover their face, which ran counter to Hanbali jurisprudence and Saudi standards. — Wikipedia contributors, Wahhabism, 43

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the pattern in the Ambedkar material where anti-caste ideology itself reproduced caste-grade logics and hierarchies.
• SHARE: The detail that a fatwa permitting women to uncover their face got one of the century’s leading Salafi scholars expelled from Saudi Arabia is precisely the kind of narrow fact one specific person into Islamic legal history would treasure.