WAR AS AN INSTRUMENT TO ACQUIRE POWER — Absolutely Obsolete

promote new thinking. By setting up industries, they can improve their economic conditions. Using modern means of communications, they can link up with others. Through NGOs they can organize their religious and cultural affairs in a more effective way. And so on. In the modern age, the communities that have discovered this reality — of the power of modern institutions — have been able to achieve impressive success despite not possessing political power. Some of them have set up their own educational empires. Others have established industrial empires or publishing empires or media empires. The latest example of such a non-political empire is the information technology empire, which has enabled those who run it to exercise an enormous control over peoples’ lives at the global level. In almost all spheres of life, people are now free of political interference and can manage them as they like. The shift of the focus of influence from politics to institutions has rendered political power into nothing but a political headache. And so, it is not necessary now, nor even desirable, for the followers of Islam to wage war for the sake of capturing political power. Irrespective of who wields political power, the followers of Islam can now, under all conditions, establish non-political institutions and thereby access all the desirable benefits. This does not mean that the followers of Islam must totally ignore politics. It simply means that while accessing the benefits that accrue from institutions and organizations, they can take to the path of peaceful political work in a limited arena. They must abstain completely from political agitation, however, and, instead, pursue their political journey calmly, within the possible limits. It may be then, that God will give them the opportunity of entering into institutions of political significance. o