The Error of Political Islam

If, through reading this book, anyone genuinely reaches a deeper understanding of the truth and attains a correct comprehension of Islam, it would be my greatest fortune, and I sincerely pray to Allah for this outcome. The interpretation under discussion is not simply a prevailing view within a particular circle that we need to attempt to correct; it goes beyond that to represent a kind of challenge. In a certain sense, this book serves as a response to that challenge. The literature produced under this interpretation explicitly, and some of its phrases—such as those in the preface to Quran Ki Chaar Buniyadi Istlahein (Four Key Concepts of the Quran) (Urdu) by Maulana Maududi—implicitly, suggest that our predecessors (the Companions of the Prophet œ, the Followers, the Followers of the Followers, as well as those who nobly followed them) did not understand the religion in its proper form. According to this interpretation, in the fourteen-hundred-year history of Islam, there is not a single movement that accomplished the task of genuine revival and renewal of Islam. Although some intelligent individuals within this circle have attempted to present certain events from Islamic history as evidence of this ideology, these efforts amount to fabricating history rather than genuine historiography. Preface to the FIRST Edition