A lot of people have a rose-tinted, naive view of the "traditional ulama" and what their role is or has been in Muslim societies.

This isn't an attack on the scholars, it's a call for nuance and an evidence-based approach to the issues at hand, not just taking sides based on cults or cliques or groups.

As an example.

I recently read @JonathanACBrown's book on slavery. One thing he mentions is that when the idea of abolishing slavery was brought to the Muslim world, the traditional ulama opposed it, on the basis of "you can't make haram what Allah made halal."

But the Salafi modernists, led by the likes of Rashid Rida, advanced a new argument that had not been heard before in Islamic history.

They said: going back to the primary sources, you see in the Quran that it encourages the freeing of slaves, as do many ahadith.

And there's nothing in the primary sources that *requires* Muslim societies to have slavery. Therefore, abolishing slavery is compatible with Islam.

(Some went even further and said that Islam had encouraged abolition since the beginning but the texts had been misunderstood.)

Eventually all Muslim societies banned slavery, some later than others.

Now most traditional ulama take the same stance as the Salafi modernists of 100 years ago. But the intrasagience of the ulama back then on this issue is something we should definitely learn from.

Does this mean they were bad people? No. Does this mean we should stop following traditional ulama? No. Does this means we should become Salafis and/or modernists? No.

What it means is we should get our heads out of the sand, and not view everything as this group vs that...

...group (e.g. trad. scholarship vs Salafis/modernists). It's much more complex than that, and no one camp or clique contains all the answers. "Wisdom is the lost property of the believer" as the Hadith says.