PROPHETIC MODEL VIS-À-VIS HISTORICAL MODEL

Choose the Right One

TODAY, Muslims find themselves in a state of degeneration. It is time for the Muslim community to experience a revival. But for this to happen there has to be a proper model. If a wrong model is adopted, this revival can never happen, despite a thousand years of effort.

There is only one proper model, for the revival of the Muslim community, the prophetic model. This model is fully preserved in the form of the Sunnah or the Prophet’s Method. We should study this Prophetic sunnah (method) from the relevant texts, and drawing wisdom from these, make efforts for the revival of the Muslim ummah. The Prophet left this world in 632 CE. After this, a long period of Muslim history unfolded, extending for over a thousand years. Unfortunately, every Muslim intellectual has harped only on this history. Books that were written after the Prophet, all present a highly exaggerated picture of this history of the Muslim ummah.

As a result, consciously or unconsciously, this historical Muslim model impressed itself in a very grand way on the mind of most Muslims obscuring the Prophetic model.

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A movement can be successful only with God’s help. And God’s help is only for efforts that are based on the Prophetic model.

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Because of this, today, people who seek to engage in the revival of the Muslim ummah may take the name of Islam, but, in actual fact, they only seek to revive Muslim history. Every movement ostensibly working for the revival of the Muslim community is doing just that. Some talk about reviving the period of Muslim rule. Others aim at reviving Muslim culture. Some see the enforcement of Shariah laws as the secret of Muslim revival. Others are engaged in spreading a culture of violence in the name of jihad, imagining that in this way they are reviving the Muslim ummah.

In modern times, movements of this sort have emerged and become active on a massive scale in different parts of the world. But, despite their loud, fiery and sensational efforts, they have proved to be unsuccessful. There is only one cause for this failure. And that is, these movements did not receive God’s help. The cause of this was that all these movements emerged on the basis of the Muslim historical model. Not one of them was based on the Prophetic model.

There is a stark difference between the Prophetic model and the Muslim historical model. The former is based on inviting people to God. In contrast, the latter is based on politics, culture and communalism. A movement can be successful only with God’s help. And God’s help is only for efforts that are based on the Prophetic model.