Islam Rediscovered
21. Islam in History
~ 357 ~
would ever attempt to put a curb on religious
freedom. And that if this problem ever arose, it
would be due to the adoption of some wrong
policy, or the committing of some blunder by the
believers themselves. That is why the Prophet gave
extremely important guidelines as an advance
warning to Muslims.
In books of
hadith
, there are a large number of
traditions which foretell the setting in of corruption
in the Muslim rulers of later times, yet Muslims
were strictly forbidden to wage war on them in the
name of political reform. The Muslims were rather
enjoined to keep their distance from them, to take to
the hills (that is, to stay away from political
activities) and to devote themselves to tending their
sheep and goats. That is to say that they had to
abandon the path of political confrontation in
favour of continuing their activities in non-political
fields, such as education,
da’wah
, the service of the
Qur’an and
hadith
, etc.
In the first phase of Islam, it was Abdullah ibn
Zubayr who violated this prohibition. He engaged
in an armed confrontation with the Umayyad ruler,
