[AngelinaLip]

seeing thread after thread againats places like al maghrib and mercy mission

Please provide evidence of this claim.

I am not familiar with Mercy Mission (is this UK only?) but with al-Maghrib, I know how they operate. The reason they do not mention Deobandis specifically is because Deobandis are just another pool for them to show a side of an issue, which is the Hanafi side. During its lectures on fiqh, for example, Al-Maghrib lecturers mention opinions from all scholars across the board and then they say that the evidence for this is stronger than the evidence for that - all based on their limited understanding. What they basically end up implying is that the scholars of a particular madhhab for centuries were too dumb or too blind to see the "stronger" opinion and were too biased for their madhhab to see what the stronger evidence was and that the al-Maghrib lecturers, somehow, are smarter than the combined intellect of the scholars of a madhhab to say which opinion is stronger than the other amongst the madhahib.

I have friends who are fanatics when it comes to al-Maghrib to such an extent that many of them now claim to not follow a madhhab but "follow a shaykh" only. Then, once you ask them why do you still do this according to this madhhab or that madhhab, they contend that they do not have knowledge and yet they are so adamant on saying that they do not follow a madhhab. For example, a friend of mine prays Witr according to the Hanafi way. Al-Maghrib has stated that it is not the strongest opinion of the scholars and the shaykh from al-Maghrib that this brother follows also does not pray this way. I thought he was just playing with words but then he trimmed his beard (note that his beard was halfway to fist length before he trimmed it down to less than half an inch in length). When I asked him why, he said his shaykh allows it. So, he trimmed his beard because his shaykh allows it but he does not pray the same way as his shaykh does? Does this not smack of fatwa shopping? He says he prays the only way he knows how or how he learned to pray and once he learns from al-Maghrib what the "proper" way is, he'll adopt that instead. Bear in mind that al-Maghrib is nowhere near a madrassa, yet many people who attend al-Maghrib programs come out thinking themselves to be knowledgeable to such an extent that they make major changes to the way they have been praying and what they have believed in without setting foot in a madrassa or speaking to non-al-Maghrib scholars.