The Political Interpretation of Islam

example, recorded in the Tabaqat of Ibn Saʿd (d. 845 C.E.). Once, the famous scholar Saʿid ibn al-Musayyib (d. 715 C.E.) was approached by his slave, a man named Bard, who mentioned to him about some people who spent a lot of time in worship. These people, Bard told him, prayed continuously, from the noon (zuhr) to the mid-afternoon (ʿasr) prayers. Thereupon, Saʿid ibn al-Musayyib remarked: Do you even know what worship is? Worship is contemplation on divine affairs and staying away from what God has forbidden. Now, from this statement it does not mean that a pious scholar of the stature of Saʿid ibn al-Musayyib was unaware that prayer, fasting, remembrance of God and reciting the Quran are also forms of worship, or that he thought that worship was only the two things that he had mentioned. His statement must be seen as a ‘missionary statement’, rather than as a juridical or strictly logical one. When an Islamic jurist or faqih gives his views on a particular issue, he does so in very clear and specified terms. But unlike for a faqih, for a missionary, someone engaged in dawah, inviting people to God, the issue at hand is not the intellectual or legal explanation of a particular matter, but, rather, the reform of the conditions around him. That is why he searches for those things that need to be reformed and which he feels need special mention. Hence, his discourse is driven not by strictly legalistic concerns, but, instead,