This is Not Islam

This is Not Islam

1988 10 October 21-22 This is Not Islam (874) In the time of the Prophet, people were known to have caused commotions inside the very mosque where the Prophet was praying. Even, so, the Prophet made no move to punish troublemakers. In this day and age, however, when a relatively harmless noise is heard from a street outside a mosque, it is enough to provoke the Muslims into fighting a pitched battle.

On December 25, 1987, I had a meeting with a man whose hometown had been the scene of an outbreak of communal rioting during the month of Ramadhan earlier in the year. When I asked him for details, he explained that Muslims had been offering their night prayers in the mosque when they heard a commotion coming from the street outside. It seemed that a non-Muslim marriage procession was passing by and participants were pausing at different places to play musical instruments. A group of Muslims came out of the mosque and demanded that members of the marriage party should desist from making a noise in the vicinity of the mosque, as prayers were being offered inside. The non-Muslims ignored this request, whereupon a verbal exchange ensued, which escalated into a full-scale riot.

“So much for the way you people act,” I said in reply to his tale. “Now, I should like to tell you about the course of action followed by the Prophet in similar circumstances. As you know, in the early days of Islam, the idolators still held sway in Mecca, which meant that they also had the Holy Kaabah under their control. This placed them in a position to subject the Prophet and his followers to all sorts of cruel provocation. One way was to stir up a commotion whenever the Prophet and his followers entered the House of God. The Quran dismisses this practice as unworthy in the following verse: “Their prayers at the Sacred House were nothing but whistling and clapping of hands. They shall be punished for their unbelief” (8:35).

Quranic commentators, such as Ibn Kathir, (with Abd Allah ibn Umar as his source) and Qazi Sana-ullah tell of how the idolators put their faces to the ground, blew whistles and clapped their hands in order to distract the Prophet from his prayers. According to a statement of Imam Muqatil, recorded by Qazi Sahib, two men would stand blowing whistles to right of the Prophet while he was saying his prayers, while two men stood to his left, clapping. In his Tafsir al-Mazhari, he writes that, in the course of their circumambulation of the house of God, the Quraysh came face to face with the Prophet then they would make derogatory remarks about him. Mudarik tells of how the idolators even made the rounds of the House of God in a state of complete nudity. All of these pranks were played simply in order to reduce the Prophet to a state of mental disarray. But the Prophet was not one whit disconcerted. During his thirteen years in Mecca, the Prophet was persistently subjected to such treatment, yet, never once did he protest. Never once did he resort to retaliatory action. Instead, he kept his patience, steadfastly refusing to be provoked by the actions of the Quraysh. It should be remembered that by this time the Prophet was not alone. He was surrounded by a sizeable group of believers who were nothing wanting in bravery and who would have been ready to fight and to sacrifice themselves in defense of their faith. Even so, the Prophet never incited his followers to attack the Quraysh, nor did he ever once take any other measures to put and end to their clamour and commotion.

The Prophet’s silence in the face of the disturbances created by the idolators was certainly not the result of fear. It was rather a part of the strategy consciously adopted by the Prophet. He was fully aware of the fact that if anything is to be achieved in this world, there is always something else which must be relinquished. If the Prophet was to be successful in communicating God’s message, he knew that he should have to abandon any idea of entering into quarrels and confrontations. He should have to keep himself completely aloof from all dissention. Hence the Prophet’s policy of disregarding all provocation aimed at diverting him from his mission by the Quraysh and, instead, concentrating solely on preaching his message and calling the people to Islam. Finally, however, there came a time when God Himself altered the situation radically by putting an end not only to the chaotic behaviour of the idolators, but also to the idolators themselves.

In the time of the Prophet, people were known to have caused commotions inside the very mosque where the Prophet was praying. Even so, the Prophet made no move to punish troublemakers. In this day and age, however, when a relatively harmless noise is heard from a street outside a mosque, it is enough to provoke the Muslims into fighting a pitched battle.

Clearly, if the Prophet’s actions were truly in consonance with Islam, then Muslim behaviour today is the very opposite. Now it is for the Muslims to decide which method to adopt – their own misguided one, or that of the Prophet.