Where Does an Erroneous Interpretation of the Deen Take Us?

Government’, in just the same way as one can with regard to the polity that the Prophet Muhammad established in Madinah. In other words, he suggested that even though the Quran does not explicitly mention the establishment of Divine Government by earlier prophets, and this remains unknown to History so far, it must be accepted as an actual fact simply because this person’s conception of the deen suggested to him that this must certainly have been the case. This is the same sort of argument that Friedrich Engels employed when he said that while history had not recorded the conditions of pre-historic Man, his conception of the universe and human life led him to believe that pre-historical human society must certainly have been a communist one. From this discussion, it is clearly apparent how a change of perspective leads to a change in one’s basic conception of things. For instance, if you look at Indian history through the eyes of Mao Tse-tung, Mahatma Gandhi will appear to you as a ‘bourgeois agent’, while through Indian eyes he looks like the hero of the nation. In just the same way, if one sees the world in the light of the political interpretation of the deen, it would seem as if Muslim religious history has for very long been characterized by an enormous vacuum. You would be led to think that throughout almost the whole of Islamic history there was neither a proper and complete conception of the deen nor any