- Categories: CURRENT AFFAIRS, SALAF SALIHEEN
- Language: ENGLISH
- Format: PDF
The Quran and the Sunnah have been the guide of Muslim political and moral activism throughout the centuries. The example of how the Prophet Muhammad and his companions led their lives and developed the first Muslim community serves as a blueprint for an Islamically guided and socially just state and society.
More than a prophet, the Prophet Muhammad, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him, was the founder of a state. In the era of the Prophet Muhammad and his successors, all Muslims belonged to a single community whose unity was based upon the interconnection of religion and the state, where faith and politics were inseparable. Islam expanded from what is now Saudi Arabia across North Africa, through the Middle East and into Asia and Europe. Historically, Islam has been the religious ideology for the foundation of a variety of Muslim states, including the great Islamic empires: Umayyad (661–750), Abbasid (750–1258), Ottoman (1281– 1924), Safavid (1501–1722), and Mughal (1526–1857). In each of these empires and other sultanate states, Islam was the basis of the state’s legal, political, educational, economic, and social institutions. By the 11th century the Islamic world was under attack by the Turks and the Mongols. They were not conquered by Islam; rather, they entered the Islamic world as conquerors and converted to Islam over the following centuries.
Over the last two centuries the Islamic world has been under another transformation from the West. The Europeans who came in the 19th and 20th centuries to militarily colonize the Muslim world did not convert like the Turks and Mongols. For the first time, Muslims were politically subjugated by the European empires of Russia, Holland, Britain, and France.
