He believes that the Sunnis with their mosques, madrasas, palaces, factories and hospitals have achieved an unattainable position because none of the non-Sunnis have performed such services. Rivalry between Ashʿarīya and Salafīya and the 2016 Sunni conferences Since the second half of the 20th century, there have been fierce clashes within the Sunni camps between Ashʿarites on the one hand and Salafiyya on the other, who exclude each other from Sunnism. In Indonesia, the Ashʿarite scholar Sirajuddin Abbas (d. 1980) wrote several books in the 1960s in which he explicitly excluded the Ahl as-salaf from Sunnism. Among other things, he argued that there was no Salafi madhhab in the first 300 years of Islam. From this he deduced that those who called other Muslims to obey the Salafi madhhab, were promoting a madhhab which did not even exist. In his view, only the Ashʿarites were real Sunnis. Abbas' books served as the theological basis for anti-Salafist campaigns in Aceh in 2014. During these campaigns, various Salafist schools in Aceh were closed by the provincial government. Apparently because of doubts about the Salafīya affiliation with Sunniism, the "Standing Committee on Scientific Investigation and Fatwa Issuing" in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa stating that they consider the Salafis as Sunnis. Like many Ashʿarites, the Salafis believe their teachings are the only true form of Sunnism, and hence reject the Asharites and Maturidites as part of Sunnism. An example is the Saudi scholar Muhammad Ibn al-ʿUthaimīn, who in his 2001 published commentary on Aqīda Wāsiṭīya by Ibn Taimiyya expressed the opinion that Ash'arites and Māturīdites would not count among the Sunnis, because their doctrine of attributes would be in contrast to the doctrine of the Prophet and his companions. For this reason, the view that three groups belong to Sunnism should also be rejected. Sunnis are only those who are salaf in terms of belief. The accusation by some Wahhabis that the Ashʿarites were not Sunnis was subject of a fatwa by the "Egyptian Fatwa Office" in July 2013. In its fatwa, the office rejected this accusation, affirming that the Ashʿarites still represented the "multitude of scholars" (jumhūr al-ʿulamāʾ), and stressed out that they were the ones who in the past rejected the arguments of the atheists (šubuhāt al-malāḥida). Anyone who declares them to be unbelieving or who doubts their orthodoxy should fear for their religion. On the same day, the fatwa office