Power
&
Politics

The Qur'an tells us

that when Adam and Eve fell from the Garden,

humans became enemies of each other.

Along with love they discovered hate,

and the result became clear with Cain and Able.

As enemies, humans try to gain power over each other,

and they do that with a combination of strength and will.

In the beginning, the only strength that counted was physical strength,

as seen in animals fighting to prove themselves the strongest and healthiest

to father new young ones.

But more than that,

like Cain and Able,

people hate each other out of jealousy of what other people have,

whether that be things they own,

or the power they have,

or the number of friends or followers,

or whether they are being preferred to them unfairly.

People have fought wars since the dawn of history,

and before the Messenger, in the Time of Ignorance,

the rival clan families were constantly fighting with each other.

Warlike raids on each other,

and attacks on trading caravans,

were seen as perfectly normal.

Now along with the bloodshed there were times of discussion,

when hostages could be ransomed and treaties could be agreed on.

There was politics.

There were negotiations between enemies,

with people coming to some sort of verbal agreement,

admitting who was the most powerful.

But the Messenger stopped those clan family wars amongst his followers,

and made everyone see themselves as one clan, one family,

one umma.

So while the Messenger was alive,

with God's Word being spoken through him,

those clan differences seemed much less important,

but those old understandings of a lifetime

did not vanish, but were just kept under control,

and they quickly rose to the surface again when the Messenger died.

So the divisions in the umma showed from the beginning,

and the politics of power was recognised as flawed from the earliest moments on.

When Abu Bakr was put in charge,

there was immediate rebellion in the desert tribes that needed an army to put down,

and the following years were filled with bloodshed.

Three of the first four caliphs were murdered,

and after the murder of Uthman

there was civil war among the Companions.

Then after the death of Ali,

even the party of the Sunnah stopped thinking of the Caliph as having any true religious guidance,

Since then, all talk of authority within the umma

comes down to politics and earthly power.

But the spirit of the umma was not in its politics but its way of life,

a sharing of the Shahada, the Sala and the Qur'an,

and it was that which kept them as a family.

It is often said that politics is part of the Islamic Way of Life,

but that doesn't mean that the politics found in the history of the umma

must always be seen as Islamic politics.