THE COMMAND OF WAR IN ISLAM

~ 62 ~ time there were two major empires, the Byzantine and the Sassanid, to both of which the reform movement in Arabia posed a challenge. As a result, these empires wanted to crush it. The Prophet’s companions therefore faced stiff resistance, but by God’s succour they were successful in their mission and the coercive system, termed “absolute imperialism” by the French historian Henri Pirenne, was uprooted. It took this revolutionary event to end a coercive system which had been established for centuries and replace it with a system based on freedom. This goal could not have been achieved in its first stage. But by divine succour Islam succeeded in breaking the historical continuity of this ancient coercive system in the 7th century. Subsequently, this change affected all of human history and as a continual process, ebbed and flowed until it reached its culmination in the 20th century. Then came the de-centralization which took place at the beginning of the 20th century, political power being limited solely to the administration. And the interference of political institutions became very limited. Social departments became generally independent of it.