THE SECTARIAN PHENOMENON

books. People now learned that among the companions there were many minor differences in matters of the method of worship. Guidance in this regard was provided in the Hadith, because the Prophet is reported to have said about his companions that whichever of them people followed, they would be rightly guided. According to this Hadith report, minor differences in methods of worship were because of the phenomenon of diversity. They were not a question of truth versus falsehood. Each of these methods was equally proper. But the fuqaha or legal specialists in the Abbasid period engaged in ijtihad and declared, ‘Truth cannot be many’. Then, they debated among themselves and adopted one or the other method of worship and declared that the other methods ought to be abandoned. Different fuqaha did this with regard to their particular methods of worship. In this way, various schools of fiqh came into being. Later on, exaggeration and bias led these schools to finally turn into distinctly separate maddhabs of jurisprudence. Splitting up of a religion into factions that the Quran refers to is about people following the religion fabricated by their leaders instead of the religion of God. Consider an instance of a ‘shift of emphasis’ leading to sectarianism from the contemporary period. This concerns the group commonly known as the Tablighi Jama‘at. The founder of the Tablighi Jama‘at, Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhalvi (d. 1944), observed that people had generally become lax about their prayers. In the words of the poet Muhammad Iqbal: Masjiden marsiya khwan hain ki namazi na rahe (Mosques lament that sincere worshippers no longer remain) Faced with this situation, Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhalvi gave great stress to the importance of prayer. He launched a full-fledged movement to encourage people to pray. But later on, this movement fell prey to exaggeration and prejudice. Its followers began to think that religion was just another name for praying in mosques and travelling from place to place. But the fact is that the message of Islam and the Islamic mission are centred on the human being, not on the mosque as such.