Notably, the first ever OASIS-organised Salafi conference to take place in the UK in the post-JIMAS era was at the Amanah Muath Trust on Stratford Road in Birmingham in August 1996. Coincidentally, it was also the first ever major Islamic conference that I, and many young British Muslims like me, had ever attended. In the pre-internet era, a gathering such as this revealed just how many others in the UK were also in search of the true version of Islam, as prior to this conference many Salafi youth who were mainly university students, relied almost solely upon cassette recordings of lectures that had taken place on university campuses and centres across the country. At this conference, it was astounding to see a scattering of young British women fully dressed in head-to-toe abayas and niqabs, and young bearded men dressed in thawbs (above-the-ankle long shirt)—the attire of Arab women and men whom I had observed on my recent pilgrimage to Makkah and visit to Madinah.
The attendees’ Sunnah-style dress and the fact that both males and females were adequately segregated and catered for, was to my mind, a promising sign of the group’s authenticity and purity—very unlike a FOSIS event I had briefly attended a year or so earlier. OASIS founder Shaykh Abu Khadeejah recalls that there were approximately 2,500 people from all over the country at their first conference. More significantly, the event is remembered by many to have been the clincher in their deciding which way to go in their search of the correct path, free from the ideologies of other sects. This is because the gathering was suddenly transformed by the chance visit of three prominent shaykhs: Muhammad bin Hādi and Abdus-Salām Burjiss from the KSA, and Muhammad al-Anjarī from Kuwait. Their presence turned what began as an Islamic youth conference, into a scholarly gathering where the visiting shaykhs, who were considered greater in knowledge, experience, and wisdom, clarified the Sunnah and the methodology of the Salaf to those attendees in search of clarity and guidance.[1]
[1] Abdul-Wāhid 2013.
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