ULEMA AND THE MODERN AGE — Misguided Politics

The difference in the two contexts is clearly apparent from the fact that in Makkah it was possible for the wife of Abu Lahab to condemn the Prophet and to even publicly sing verses criticizing him and announcing that she refused to accept the message he was propagating. On the other hand, in the 13th year of his prophethood, when the Prophet, along with his companion Abu Bakr, arrived in Madinah, he was greeted by the children of the town singing verses that celebrated his arrival and his message. A similar example can be drawn from the life of the Prophet Moses. The Children of Israel, the people of Moses, the Quran tells us, had been destined to acquire political power once again. And so, after the demise of Moses, the Children of Israel rose up in revolt against the then ruler and established their own government over Syria and Palestine. Here, it is interesting to note that the Children of Israel had the same opportunity of establishing a government half a century earlier, at the time of Moses. Why, one might ask, did they have to wait for so many years till they finally did so? At the time of Moses, the Pharaoh of Egypt and his entire army were drowned in the sea, and this cleared the field for Moses. Moses could have returned to the then Egyptian capital, Memphis, along with the Children of Israel, and occupied the vacant Egyptian throne. After the miraculous destruction of the Pharaoh and his army, the denizens of Egypt must have been so awe-struck that they would have readily accepted Moses as their new ruler. But Moses did not do this. Instead, he left the vacant political field of Egypt and, along with his people, went into the Sinai desert. There, the Children of Israel faced forty years of harsh life, where a new generation was born, that was reared in the desert and survived. Now, the only reason for this delay was that the generation of the Children of Israel that had earlier lived in Egypt had, for certain particular reasons, fallen prey to moral decline, so much so, as the Quran (5: 25) relates, Moses told God that besides himself and his brother Aaron (Harun), he had no faith in any person. And so, all the people of Children of Israel were kept in the wilderness so that a new generation of the Children of Israel, reared in the desert, should develop a reliable character and then become capable of establishing an Islamic government.