Best books about sunnism islam according to redditors

There’s this on Kindle, also on Kindle Unlimited : “Syria’s Sunni Islam under Hafiz al-Asad” by Annabelle Boettcher. Pretty dry, academic suff though, I’ve only read a third of it so far.

> Sunni Muslims are free to question and ignore scholars of Islam, although we are supposed to take the opinions of credible scholars under advisement. You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that what a scholar says is gospel. That being the case, you may be confusing Sunni Islam with Salafism. Taqleed is reprehensible in Sunni Islam, but obligatory in Salafism.

You mixed these up. Taqlid far predates the modern Salafi movement and is anything but reprehensible to traditionalist Muslims.

Definitions from Wael Hallaq, The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law

https://imgur.com/a/tqfIK

Modern Sunni and fairly anti-Salafi

http://seekershub.org/ans-blog/2015/03/25/how-to-choose-to-follow-an-opinion-within-a-school-of-law/

http://seekershub.org/ans-blog/2010/12/06/a-reader-on-following-schools-of-thought-madhabs/

Medieval Sunni treatise in English

https://www.amazon.com/Rajabs-Refutation-Those-Follow-Schools/dp/0985884088

As far as the Salafis go, they are far more against taqlid than the traditionalists. See point 1.2 here

https://muslimmatters.org/2014/04/22/on-salafi-islam-dr-yasir-qadhi/

Sorry I missed your comment. Consider David Commins' Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia and Hamid Algar's Wahhabism: A Critical Essay. Algar's work is an immensely interesting, albeit short read, that looks at Wahhabism's historical roots from a more academic perspective.

Free ebook if anyone is interested about Sunni Islam in Syria: https://smile.amazon.com/Syrias-Sunni-Islam-under-al-Asad-ebook/dp/B0173I8YJ0/