Khaled Abou El Fadl is the very best Islamic liberal scholar there is these days, so I’ll accord considerable weight to his reading of history. Actually, what he wrote there can support both what you said and what I said.
The tenuous link, if any could be said to exist, that connects the original Salafis with the Wahhabis is the “reformist” tendency that flourished in the 19th century and was aimed at the traditional Ottoman system, which the reformers felt to be moribund.
That reformist tendency was widespread and took many different forms. The Salafism of Muhammad ‘Abduh and Muhammad Rashîd Ridâ was perhaps the best articulated. There was also a 19th-century reformist tendency in Sufism, originated by Ahmad ibn Idrîs in North Africa, out of which the Sanûsîyah movement grew (it was the Sanûsî monarchy of Libya that al-Qadhdhâfî overthrew in 1969). Deobandism in India also grew out of a reformist movement within a certain stream of Naqshbandi Sufism (which already had a more legalistic approach than other Sufis).
As we have seen, Deobandism in the 20th century eventually hardened and turned extremely fundie, which squeezed out the last remnants of anything recognizable as Sufism and went so far as to become the bedfellow of al-Qâ‘idah jihadism. Ugh. For anyone who values Sufism as the gentle, loving antidote to Wahhabi hatemongering, this was a real tragedy in the classical sense of the word.
Historians think that Wahhabism, which started in the 18th century and was the first indigenous anti-Ottoman movement within the Sunni Muslim world, was the impetus that got these other reformist tendencies going. Maybe so, maybe anti-establishment tendencies would have happened anyway as the Ottoman system showed its cracks.
But Khaled Abou El Fadl brought out a crucial difference between the Azhar Salafis and the Wahhabis: Muhammad ‘Abduh and his friends were modernist rationalist intellectuals. Wahhabism is hardcore anti-intellectual and antirational, as incompatible as can be.
That’s why the differences between the two groups known as “Salafis” far outweigh the tenuous historical link which was more of circumstance than substance. The Wahhabis claim to be recovering the original Islam from the sources, but this is quite specious: all they have recovered is the extremist Hanbalite tendency originated by Ibn Taymîyah in the 14th century, a maverick who was considered a heretic in his own time.
The Azhar Wahhabis made a similar claim, but they read their modernist bias into the same source material. In the modern age, it became a fad to make this claim, but so many different groups claiming this have drawn such different conclusions that I never take these claims at face value.
The modern Wahhabis-so-called-Salafis like our friend in Florida seem to have devolved into a lumpen-idiot cult that uses the outward language and terminology of Islam while trashing the whole spirit of the faith. You cannot have any dialogue with these types or reason with them. They are to Islam as Fred Phelps and Jack Chick are to Christianity; regular Muslims feel just as embarrassed and offended by them as our Polycarp or tomndebb feel about Phelps and Chick.
I loved the late Yitzhak Rabin for what he said to the violent Jewish Wahhaboids: “Sensible Judaism spits you out.” That’s the sort of thing the mainstream Christian, Muslim, and Hindu leaders need to say to their own Wahhaboid types who are busy trying to trash their respective religions.