A LESSON FROM HISTORY
The Divine Mission
THE Caliphate of Mu’awiyah has been made the subject of severe criticism. Some say that Mu’awiyah was the first ruler to introduce kingship into Islam. But, regardless of this criticism, it should be noted that the two-decade long rule of Mu’awiyah gives us an important lesson. Any sincere effort to deter Muslims from internal strife and conflict, even if it is at the cost of introducing monarchy to a political institution, will always bring fruitful results in favour of Islam.
Internal conflict leads Muslims to make destructive use of their Islamic spirit, yet, once distracted from the path of factional feuds, their zeal finds an active outlet in the efforts of spreading Islam.
The call to God is a sacred mission. This mission basically entails conveying the message of God peacefully. It is a prophetic mission.
Factional conflicts among Muslims are highly deplorable. An attempt, therefore, to save Muslims from internal strife encourages them to eschew unlawful acts and harnesses their Islamic spirit to the peaceful conveying of the message of Islam. The energy or collective force that might otherwise be used in destructive activities is then devoted to the progress and consolidation of Islam. The target of Muslims’ reform and the inculcation of the exalted qualities of a noble Islamic character, from which they had earlier been diverted by factional feuds, is automatically achieved.
Had the Muslims crusading spirit been directed to the external sphere as in its earlier days, world history today would have been quite different.
The call to God is a sacred mission. This mission basically entails conveying the message of God peacefully. It is a prophetic mission. Conveying the message of God or Dawah work gives the proponent the opportunity to devote himself to outside activities. For the fulfilment of his task, he turns his zeal outwards. Externally targeted, the crusading spirit is then optimally exercised.
The accomplishment of the mission of calling people to God by Muslims brings divine grace to them, and develops in the community all those exalted qualities that are considered to be the key to unity.
The history of Islam presents ample proof of the above mentioned facts. The period of thirty years after the death of the Prophet, when Muslims were engaged in the task of propagating Islam in the outer sphere, was marked by complete unity in Muslim ranks. But with the beginning of internal conflicts in the last days of Caliph Uthman, the process of the spread of Islam was stopped for ten years. However, the task of propagating Islam was resumed by Muslims when internal conflict came to an end as a result of the voluntary withdrawal of Hasan ibn Ali from the caliphate, and it continued on course for the next twenty years. Again, it was permanently disrupted due to conflict between Banu Umayyah and Banu Hashim on the issue of political reform after Amir Mu’awiyah’s death in 680 AD.
Muslims are now paying the penalty for having given up the cause of spreading Islam, due to their unceasing internal conflict over the centuries. These conflicts are ostensibly taking place in the name of Islam, but in fact nothing is more un-Islamic in the world of God than this lamentable disunity.
The call to God is basically the title of the Islamic mission to convey the message of God. In the general sense, call to Islam entails the popularization of the purely basic teachings of the religion for religious harmony.
The accomplishment of the mission of calling people to God by Muslims brings divine grace to them, and develops in the community all those exalted qualities that are considered to be the key to unity.
It is an accepted fact that there is no contradiction in the fundamentals of religion. On the contrary, there are considerable differences among the people of various sects on juristic issues, which are peripheral to religion. Therefore, whenever Islam draws the public attention, the basic aspects, which are unanimously agreed upon, are given due prominence, while the controversial aspects are kept in the background.
It is a natural principle that whenever a community devotes itself to the cause of calling people to God, it is blessed with unity and solidarity. People’s attention, in such circumstances, is centred upon the basic and widely accepted precepts. To raise peripheral issues would mean creating differences among them. Whenever people devote their energies to promoting the basic teachings of Islam, there is inevitably a closer understanding among them. This approach eliminates conflict and paves the way for unity. To sum up, the introduction of peripheral and lesser issues leads to confrontation, whereas adherence to basic issues creates an environment favourable to integration.