I. Introduction: The Acclimatized Nose

We live in a strange and instructive moment. A Muslim today may pray five times a day, fast the month of Ramadan, pay zakāh, and avoid the major sins—and yet, without ever noticing it, think about the world through a thoroughly non-Islamic lens. The standards by which such a person judges what is progress and what is backwardness, what belongs in public life and what must be kept private, no longer descend from revelation. They arrive, quietly and continuously, from a worldview built without Islam and, in many respects, against it.

I have come to describe our predicament with a deliberately unpleasant image. It is as though we are living in a sewer, and our noses have grown so accustomed to the stench that we no longer remember what clean air smells like—no longer know what it is to live in the light of the Sharī’ah. The accommodation was not sudden. It was the slow work of a century: of educational systems, of media, of the quiet social pressure to appear modern and enlightened. Drop by drop, these forces reshaped the Muslim mind until we accepted, almost without argument, that religion belongs to the private sphere—that Islam is for the mosque, the home, and the heart, but not for governance, not for the ordering of society, not for the question of who rules and by what law.

This essay is an attempt to recover the smell of clean air. Its central claim is simple to state and difficult to absorb: politics is not a branch of Islam. It is closer to being its trunk. To treat the question of authority as one regulated domain among many—alongside marriage, commerce, and ritual—is to misunderstand what the shahādah actually asserts. I will defend this thesis in four movements: first, by clarifying what “politics” means; second, by showing how that meaning is woven into the creed itself; third, by reading the Qur’anic mission of the prophets as an inescapably political mission; and fourth, by explaining historically and structurally why so much contemporary scholarship has come to deny what was, for the classical tradition, almost too obvious to argue.

II. Disambiguating “Politics”

Almost every confusion in this debate begins with an unexamined word. When many Muslims hear “politics,” they recoil—and the recoil is understandable, because they are imagining one of two things. The first is what we might call office politics: the realm of flattery, maneuvering, and deception, where one “plays politics” by putting on a charismatic front and saying whatever advances one’s position. The second is the narrow, procedural sense familiar from the evening news: elections, parliaments, party games, and the cynical contest for seats. If this is what politics meant, the discomfort would be justified.

But neither of these is what is at stake. Politics, properly understood, is the question of authority—the question of power and its legitimate exercise. Even schoolchildren on a playground grasp that this is contentious territory: who gets a say, and who gets to be in charge. When Islam advances any claim at all about where authority should reside, where law should come from, and how society should be ordered, it necessarily collides with the way human beings arrange things in the absence of that guidance.

The Arabic term is more illuminating still. Siyāsah, the word our tradition uses for politics, carries the sense of shepherding and caretaking. One eighteenth-century Arabic dictionary defines it as the guiding of humanity, from a particular vantage, toward the path of salvation in this world and the next. I know of no better one-line description of the work of Islam and of the prophets themselves. To shepherd a people, to caretake them, to guide them toward salvation—this is not a degraded activity from which the pious withdraw. It is the very labor the prophets undertook.

Once we hold this definition in view, the centrality of politics to Islam becomes hard to deny. Consider the testimony of Mu’ādh, a Companion familiar to almost every Muslim because he recurs in the songs of our heritage as one of the great generals of Islamic history. When Mu’ādh first heard about Islam, he is reported to have said to the Prophet—peace be upon him—that it seemed he had come with a matter the kings would hate. Why would kings hate it? Because people who hold worldly authority will always have a problem with a message that relocates ultimate authority elsewhere. That instinct of the king is, in its own way, more theologically literate than the instinct of the modern Muslim who insists that Islam has nothing to do with power.

III. The Shahādah as a Statement About Authority

There is a widely read book, Islam and Politics, by a celebrated Deobandi scholar, whose opening chapter argues that politics is not central to Islam but merely a part of it. Islam, the argument runs, regulates marriage; Islam regulates commerce; and Islam regulates politics. It is simply one more domain among many. I do not deny that Islam regulates politics. The error lies in the category. To file governance alongside the etiquette of trade and the contract of marriage is to miss entirely what we mean when we say that Islam is political.

To see why, we must ask what kind of statement the shahādah is. When a Muslim declares that there is no deity but Allah, what claim about reality is being made? Strip the formula back to its core and it asserts that there is no authority over creation except Allah. This is not an advanced or esoteric teaching; a child in a sixth-grade Islamic studies class can state it. Ask students what the shahādah means and they will tell you, correctly, that we obey Allah alone, that Allah is the only authority. But here the difficulty begins, because the term “God” has acquired secularized connotations. When the modern ear hears “God,” it pictures a metaphysical creator—an entity with an independent will who fashioned the universe and to whom one directs supplication. All of this is true of Allah, but it is incomplete. The secular concept of “a god” cannot fully contain the meaning of ilāh; there can, in truth, be no synonym for Allah.

The decisive question is what the pagan Arab of seventh-century Arabia understood by the word ilāh—what the Prophet and his followers meant when they proclaimed it. The answer is not obscure. An ilāh is the entity to which ‘ibādah is directed. But this only pushes the inquiry back one step, for ‘ibādah too has been narrowed—reduced in the popular mind to ritual acts of devotion. Return to the linguistic root, however, and ‘ibādah denotes obedience: an obedience that flows from subservience and reverence, the ultimate submission of one being to another. Once this is grasped, the conclusion is unavoidable. When we speak of tawḥīd, we are speaking about authority. Authority is the central theme of Islam—it is, quite literally, in the name. Islam means submission to an authority.

Here is where the contemporary Muslim quietly truncates the creed. He affirms the principle and then privatizes it: I, as an individual, submit to Allah; I abstain from pork, I marry rightly, I pray, I fast. All of this is good and necessary. But the submission stops at the threshold of the self. It is never taken as a prescription for how society should be ordered. Contrast this with the advocate of democracy. When he argues that the people should choose how their society is run, he is not merely confessing a private preference about whom he himself will follow. He is advancing a claim about how all of society ought to exist. The shahādah operates at exactly that level of generality. We reject every other source of legislation besides our Creator—and that is not a private dietary commitment. It is a constitutional claim.

Consider, too, what we affirm when we recite al-fātiḥah. Allah is named al-Mālik, the King—the one who sets the law, the one to be obeyed, the one whose word stands without appeal. To say “You alone we worship” is to say that the King alone is the one to whom we render obedience. The King of a people ought to be the exclusive King of that people. That is the claim of Islam. And so the shahādah is, in the most precise sense, a political statement—a statement about authority over human beings, about authority over creation itself. It challenges every independent human authority and delegitimizes every claim about how society should be ordered that did not originate in revelation. Anyone who reduces politics to a mere branch or sub-section of Islam has, however unintentionally, failed to grasp how the meaning of the creed bears on the meaning of the political.

There is even a hierarchy of obedience to consider. Which is the greater glorification of God: that one individual submit to Him, or that all of humanity—every individual within it included—submit to Him collectively? We cannot rest content with a private settlement in which I pray my five prayers, earn only what is lawful, and avoid the forbidden, while remaining serenely indifferent to the fact that nowhere on earth today is the Sharī’ah of Allah the system by which society is actually ordered. To be faithful to the words lā ilāha illā Allah is to be incapable of complacency before such a reality.

IV. The Prophets Were Sent to Judge

The first scholar to articulate, in modern times, the claim that the prophetic mission was apolitical was ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Rāziq, an Azharī scholar who in 1925 published a book contending that Islam is a religion and not a state—that the Prophet’s establishment of an order in Madinah was incidental rather than integral to his mission. On this view, had the Prophet been able to exist merely as a protected minority preacher, he would have been content. The thesis was, at the time, scandalous enough that al-Azhar still possessed the institutional self-respect to investigate the book, refute its claims, and revoke the author’s standing. It is a measure of how far the waters have receded that ‘Abd al-Rāziq’s position is now, in effect, predominant—if not always in its explicit secular form, then in a softer disguise.

That disguise is the crucial phenomenon, for the outright secularist who denies that Islam has any relation to politics remains a fringe figure among scholars. The real work is done by a mainstream that practically denies the politics of Islam through a thoroughgoing deprioritization of it. Its representatives concede, in principle, that the caliphate is an obligation, and then add that it is not among the top twenty priorities—that one does not, after all, need it to enter Paradise. This is the heart of the matter. If I do not need it to enter Paradise, why would I labor for it? Why not simply secure my own salvation and let the ummah fend for itself? The logic of deprioritization, followed honestly, ends in abandonment.

Against this, there is no better corrective than the Qur’an’s own account of why the prophets were sent. The text tells us that humanity was once a single community; then they differed; so Allah sent the prophets as bearers of glad tidings and as warners, and He sent down with them the Book—so that they might judge between people in the matters wherein they differed. This verse is not isolated. A recurring Qur’anic refrain frames the purpose of revelation not as private spiritual instruction but as the establishment of judgment. And judgment is a political role. To judge is to reorganize society so that one’s rulings carry legal force—so that when two parties have a dispute, whether employer and employee or husband and wife, they bring it to the Prophet, who decides the matter according to the Book. Any issue. The Book is not a devotional supplement to a life otherwise governed by other laws; it is the operative legal authority.

Allah makes this a matter of belief itself. This is why I insist on speaking about it, and why the objection—“Why discuss such advanced topics? Speak to people about prayer, about the basics first”—misfires twice over. First, everyone is already speaking about prayer; nobody is neglecting it. Second, and more importantly, this is the basics. There is nothing more foundational than tawḥīd. Allah swears by Himself in the Qur’an that a person is not a believer until he makes the Prophet—peace be upon him—the judge in his disputes, and then submits to that judgment without resistance. Economic disputes, political disputes, matters of crime and punishment: the Prophet decides, and in his absence the Qur’an and Sunnah he left behind decide. To call this an advanced or secondary topic is to misplace the foundation of the religion.

I will add one corrective against a common rejoinder—the claim that reading the prophetic mission politically is a modern innovation, the invention of twentieth-century Islamic movements. This is simply false, and it can be checked. I once debated an interlocutor who maintained that no one before the last century had described the mission of the prophets as political. Out of curiosity I searched a large digital library of the Islamic textual heritage for the precise phrase denoting “the mission of the prophets,” filtered by century. The handful of pre-modern results were mostly off-hand references—but one was a full treatment by a Shāfi’ī jurist of the eighth century of the Hijrah, some seven hundred years ago. He proceeds point by point, citing the Qur’an at each step: the mission of the prophets is to carry the message; the duty of the people is to follow it; the people follow it by obeying the Messenger; and—this is the decisive move—that obedience is not accomplished until the legislation of Allah is established as the legislation of society. He uses the very vocabulary of the exclusivity of legislation to Allah, quotes the relevant Qur’anic verse, and then expounds at length on the role of Islam in liberating humanity from tyranny and establishing peace through the only means by which it can be established—the Sharī’ah. Reading it, I felt as though I were reading a manifesto of the very movements my opponent had dismissed as modern inventions. This is not new. It is the basics of Islam, clear from the Qur’an and understood across the centuries. Only with the secularization of Islam have people taken every available measure to avoid understanding the faith politically—to keep it a private religion of the kind their masters would prefer.

V. A Fish Out of Water: Living Outside the System

If the foregoing is correct, then a sobering consequence follows. A Muslim who lives outside the Sharī’ah is like a fish out of water. Much of what Islam asks of us presupposes the system that was meant to accompany it; without that system, a great deal of our practice becomes improvised and ad hoc—especially for Muslims living as minorities. Most people do not realize, to take one example, that the Friday prayer was instituted in tandem with the establishment of the state in Madinah, and that classically it was to be led by the political authority or his representative, one congregation gathering the district. We today have no such political representation from an Islamic standpoint. Scholars have differed over what this means for our Friday prayers—some holding the gathering invalid, others maintaining its validity—but the disagreement itself testifies to how deeply we live in an age of exceptions, an age in which the Muslim risks forgetting what it even means to be a Muslim. Our very notion of Islam has been reshaped by the exceptional and abnormal conditions we inhabit.

This is why it matters to re-immerse Muslims in the question: what would it be like to live outside the sewer—to be, once again, a fish in water? We need a visceral sense of what we are missing: what it means to be a servant of Allah in the proper context, which is an Islamic context. A Companion who could see the condition of the ummah today could not rest at ease with it. And yet the Companions were warned by the Prophet—peace be upon him—that such a time would come; there are prophecies of this era, of the love of the world and the fear of death that would weaken the community. To hear of a thing is one matter; to see it is another. I do not believe a Companion who beheld our state would consent to go on living in it.

I must be careful here against a particular misunderstanding, because it bears directly on the question of strategy: did any Muslim community ever become spiritually perfected first and only then receive political authority? The historical record suggests otherwise. There is no precedent for the idea that society must become uniformly virtuous before Islam can be established. People confuse two distinct things—the cultivation of the Companions with the establishment of Islam over society. The Companions were a minority, a small percentage of the broader society, whether in the Makkan period or in Madinah. When Islam was established in Madinah, not everyone was yet Muslim; there were still polytheists, and even among the Muslims many were new converts who had entered the faith because a relative or a tribal chief had done so, with little settled īmān. The five daily prayers had not even been instituted in their final form. Spiritual perfection was plainly not a precondition.

What, then, was the precondition? Not the perfection of ritual but a broader alignment: a society that agreed on the fundamentals of Islam and wished to live by them. That is what was achieved in Madinah, at both the elite and the popular levels—a collective consent to Islam as the way the society would order its common life. On that basis the community gave its unconditional allegiance to the Prophet—peace be upon him—who now possessed the buy-in and the authority to shape the society in an Islamic direction. And it was through that authority that the individual spirituality and righteousness of the people were subsequently cultivated. Here lies my principal criticism of those who insist that the road to revival runs only through spiritual rectification and personal piety, postponing the political question indefinitely. There is no more effective instrument for cultivating a people at scale than a government that wills to do so—an environment and a body of policy that make the lawful easy and the forbidden difficult, if not impossible. To concede that leadership requires knowledge and inner formation is right, and I insist on it; an apolitical agitation that seizes for power without that foundation will fail. But the notion that the whole of society must first be perfected is not consistent with the Prophetic precedent.

VI. The Machinery of Silence: Power, Co-optation, and Inherited Fixation

If the political reading of Islam is so well-grounded in language, creed, and scripture, why do so many learned and sincere scholars avoid it—or frame it so vaguely as to defuse it? The answer must be sought in the dynamics of power. When a scholar voices the unadulterated truth of Islam, he voices something in direct tension with the secular structures of authority that govern the Muslim world—structures inherited from the colonial settlement of roughly a century ago. Islam, as we have seen, delegitimizes any system of governance not founded on revelation. To speak of that aspect of the faith is to threaten the legitimacy of the regimes themselves; one should not be surprised that they are intolerant of it.

The dominant posture of the past century I would call the Napoleonic approach to Islam. The colonizers concluded that they would not crush Islam in the crusading style, declaring themselves the people of truth and Muslims the heretics—though one notes, with concern, that such rhetoric is beginning to return. Instead, they chose to bisect it: Islam as a religion of peace, of prayer and fasting, is beautiful and welcome; but those who make it political are recast as extremists and fundamentalists, placed outside the bounds of what a normal Muslim is or ought to be. The scholarly classes were thereby segmented. Speak about Islam politically, as it was meant to be spoken about, and confront the political realities directly, and you are on a fast track to being de-platformed—in the harsher states, to imprisonment, torture, exile, or worse. Toe the line the regime prefers, and you are on a fast track to platforms, funding, and television.

The result is a kind of natural selection in religious discourse, a survivorship bias. The speech that survives is the speech the regime tolerates; the speech that does not survive is censored, suppressed, or eliminated. The scholars placed before the public are disproportionately those who have made a bargain—often justified to themselves as ḥikmah, wisdom: It is unwise to speak of these matters; it would harm my da’wah; the people still need to hear about prayer. But this should provoke suspicion rather than admiration. When you are told you may speak about ninety-nine percent of things provided you never touch the remaining one percent, the rational response is not gratitude for so generous a bargain. It is to ask why that one percent is forbidden—and to consider that the very thing you are prohibited from addressing may be the thing most deserving of your attention. As the saying goes, they let scholars speak about what is beneath the ground and above the sky, but not about what happens on the ground.

We must, in fairness, draw distinctions. The scholar living under a brutal dictatorship who speaks cautiously, even on a considered juristic basis, is not in the same moral position as the scholar in the West who enjoys full freedom of speech and nonetheless refuses to take clear positions. The latter has far less excuse. When I speak freely about the religion, I may be maligned, an article written against me, my reputation impugned—but I will not vanish into a regime’s dungeons. Some Western scholars, to be sure, fold under lesser pressures: anxiety about upsetting people, about endangering institutional projects, about reputational risk. The caution becomes excessive, a reflex of perpetual self-protection. But there is also a subtler mechanism at work, an inherited fixation. A century of secularization and institutional capture in the Muslim lands produced teachers who, under duress, emphasized certain topics and suppressed others. Their students in the West then absorbed that emphasis as the substance of Islam itself—and now reproduce it even in the absence of the pressure that originally generated it. They mistake a deformation born of coercion for the natural shape of the faith.

The institutional history makes this concrete. Al-Azhar, the most venerable seat of Sunni learning, began to be subverted as early as the nineteenth century under the modernizing dominion of Muḥammad ‘Alī, the Ottoman governor who dispatched imams to Paris and set about secularizing Egyptian institutions on their return. In the same century, Muḥammad ‘Abduh—a father of Islamic modernism—rose to become Grand Mufti. By the mid-twentieth century, under Jamāl ‘Abd al-Nāṣir, whatever institutional independence remained was seized outright and placed under direct state control. The principle is, in retrospect, simple common sense: a secular nationalist regime whose authority is not founded on the Qur’an and Sunnah will not permit its Islamic universities to produce revolutionaries against it. It will not ban Islamic scholarship altogether—that generates too much friction—but will instead permit it with guardrails, ensuring that certain themes are emphasized and others quietly left aside. Co-optation is more efficient than prohibition, because a compliant scholarly class becomes a legitimizing force: the layman sees respected scholars holding state positions and concludes that the rulers cannot, after all, be against Islam. This is precisely the intended effect.

The structure has been described from the other side as well. The observation, often attributed to a prominent linguist and critic, that a system establishes the boundaries of acceptable opinion and then permits vigorous debate within those boundaries—so that people feel free while never approaching the real limits—captures the mechanism exactly. A former African head of state put the same point with grim humor: he could guarantee freedom of speech, but not freedom after speech. The lesson for the Muslim is that he must fear Allah more than he fears the regime. The stories of the Qur’an are stories of men and prophets who spoke the truth regardless of consequence. That is the prophetic arc: to go to a people upon falsehood and preach the truth, especially when it is hardest, and to face the consequences—death, persecution, exile— leaving the outcome to Allah, who in the Qur’anic narratives grants His people victory either through the destruction of the regime or its conversion. The most defining trait of prophetic character is not merely gentleness with one’s neighbors; it is fearlessness before creation, born of total fear of the Creator. And a scholar, in the Qur’anic criterion, is not merely the one with degrees, platform, and learning. It is the God-fearing who are the true scholars. Muslims must recalibrate to whom they assign that scholarly respect.

VII. The Myth of Neutrality

A great many Muslims raised in secular environments will say, with an air of moderation, that they “do not mix religion and politics.” They imagine this to be a neutral, common-sense stance. It is nothing of the kind. It is a particular ideological position—a secular one—dressed up as neutrality. The very idea that “religion” is one thing and “politics” another is a recent invention, born of the European Enlightenment, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with nameable philosophers behind it. The separation of religion from governance is not an Islamic belief; Islam is explicitly opposed to it. The Qur’an speaks without ambiguity of Allah as the sole legislator, and the mission of the faith is to establish the religion in the ordering of common life. Beyond these general declarations stands an entire concrete body of legislation across every domain of human existence—not only crime and punishment, but economy as well: tariffs forbidden save in retaliation, monopolies prohibited, an intricate law of contracts that must be enforced. These are political questions by their very nature.

The person who declares that he keeps his Islam separate from politics is therefore not apolitical at all. He is political, and his political ideology is secularism; he has simply accepted a particular framing without recognizing it as one. A thinker on the contemporary right has noted the sleight of hand at work in our vocabulary: to “politicize” something carries a negative connotation—it is bad to politicize an issue—while to “democratize” carries a positive one. Yet democracy is itself political. The word “politics” has been quietly weaponized: not to indict politics as such, but to indict only those political ideologies that compete with the secular-democratic status quo. The status quo gets to present itself as mere common sense, mere truth, while every rival is dismissed as “politicizing” the matter. But what is the secular claim about the good, if not itself a discussion of who holds authority and what our source of truth shall be? These are precisely the questions Islam came to answer—and they are political. If one dislikes the word, so be it; we are here to clarify meanings, and the meaning must be made plain.

How did this framework take hold of us? Not, it must be stressed, through some natural intellectual evolution in which Muslims revisited their tradition and arrived at better answers than their predecessors. The classical scholars suffered no such hesitation; al-Māwardī wrote al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyyah on governance, and the jurisprudence of the four schools contains detailed chapters on the caliphate and the duties of rulers. Those chapters did not fall out of the tradition through reasoned debate. They were displaced by war, colonization, and infiltration— by the documented penetration of institutions like al-Azhar, by modernist currents stretching from the subcontinent to the founders of secular Turkey, by the dismemberment of the Muslim lands after the First World War and the imposition of a new regional order by external powers. We were defeated on the battlefield, then in the parliaments, and finally in the universities. The reconfiguration of the Muslim mind was orchestrated, and the project has continued across the decades.

This is not a matter of speculation. The strategy is, in places, a matter of public record. A 2003 study from a major American policy institute that advises Washington divided Muslims into four categories—and the taxonomy is instructive precisely as a map of how power wishes to shape the Muslim mind. (I caution my readers emphatically: this typology is a window into their thinking, not a license to excommunicate fellow Muslims who fall into one bracket or another.) At one end stand the fundamentalists—those who hold Islam to be comprehensive and political and who seek the revival of an Islamic civilizational order. If that is their definition, I confess I belong in the category, and I take the label as a compliment; as one of the early imams observed, in times of confusion one finds the truth by following the arrows of the enemy and noting whom they attack most. Next come the traditionalists or conservatives, who describe the mainstream of religious Muslims today: people who wish to live a pious, conservative life— Muslim marriage, Muslim education, Muslim business—but at the individual or communal level, within a system of man-made law, and who are for the most part apolitical, not regarding governance as a priority. Then come the modernists, who hold that the West has perfected certain goods—a certain common sense, honesty, and decency—that Muslims might absorb, and who prefer to read Islam in terms of its broad intentions and outcomes rather than the literal detail of its law, leaving open the possibility of revisiting, for instance, the prescribed punishments. Finally there are the outright secularists, a genuine fringe—largely Western academics of Islamic studies—who deny that Islam has any relation to politics at all, and who remain unknown to the broader community precisely because the community would not accept the degree of their rejection were it heard plainly.

VIII. The Word of Truth: A Forgotten Virtue

The Prophet—peace be upon him—declared that the best jihad is a word of truth before a tyrannical ruler. What does it mean for a scholar to know this hadith and remain silent? I suspect this is among the most forgotten virtues of the religion, and perhaps the greatest, for it is paired with another teaching: that the master of martyrs is Ḥamzah—and a man who stands before a tyrant, forbids him his evil, and is killed for it. The best jihad leads to the best martyrdom. The early scholars asked why this should surpass the jihad of the battlefield, where one fights and is fought, gives and takes, and possesses some means of self-defense. Their answer: in this jihad there is no self-defense at all. To stand before the system and speak the truth is to expose oneself to humiliation and destruction with no means of protection, trusting in Allah alone—as the boy in the parable of the king who says, in effect, here I am, shoot the arrow. There is no higher īmān than that; and because it is nonviolent, exposing the self to the full brunt of the power structure without recourse, it is a sacrifice of the purest order, undertaken for the same end as all the rest—the establishment of the religion.

We face, then, a serious and endemic problem in the very culture of scholarship. It is a cultural issue in a precise sense: to train as a scholar is not merely to acquire knowledge but to join a tribe, to be inducted into a culture—and the prevailing culture has become non-conducive to the formation of an activist scholarly personality. The aspiring scholar is counseled by his predecessors to do the good he can within his community, to avoid the political, to refrain from what is supposedly bad for the ummah. Even one who perceives what I am describing may have the instinct beaten out of him by this culture. We must name it and call it out. And Muslims, for their part, must hold their scholars to a higher standard of accountability than they presently do. Why are we not speaking of this? Why is it not an active conversation?

IX. Conclusion: Reframing the Question

We began by asking whether politics is central to Islam. By now it should be clear that the question itself is framed in a subtly misleading way, for it presupposes that “politics” and “Islam” are two distinct things whose relationship must be measured. Once we understand Islam as the total submission of the human will to the divine will, that presupposition collapses. There is no political sphere and a separate non-political sphere; there is only the truth of tawḥīd and the manner in which it is to be manifested in the world. To decouple the religion from the governance of life and the pursuit of justice is to settle for a hollowed-out version of the message the Messenger of Allah—peace be upon him—actually brought.

If there is one thing I would have a young Muslim carry away from this argument, it is an understanding of the arc of the prophetic journey. Are we here to live as sheep, or to walk the walk of the prophets? Their walk was to call out to their people: Fear Allah and obey me.—a refrain repeated on the tongues of prophet after prophet in the Qur’an. They were asking for obedience, and that is a political mission, for obedience to the prophet is the very instrument by which the law of Allah is established. I want Muslims to come away understanding tawḥīd in a way they may never have understood it before: as a question of authority, of legitimate legislation, and not merely of private devotion.

To the young Muslim who has felt a disconnect between the prayers performed in the mosque and the injustices witnessed in the street: know that the intuition is sound, and that it is rooted in the Sunnah. The prophets were not sent to be hermits. They were sent to be guides and liberators— to confront the powers of their age, to judge between people by the Book, and to order common life according to the will of its Creator. And to our scholars and community leaders: the weight of the inheritance is heavy. The righteous predecessors did not sever worship from the work of justice. When our institutions remain silent before the structures that govern our lives, that silence is not neutral. It is a choice. We owe the next generation a coherent and uncompromised Islamic framework—one that does not ask them to leave their religion at the door of public life.

We are the servants of a King whose laws have been discarded by the very people who should obey them. That ought to provoke not complacency but a settled, principled anger—the kind that moves a person to learn, to teach, and, in the prophetic manner, to speak the word of truth. The light of the Sharī’ah has been dimmed in the lands. The first labor of revival is to remember what that light looked like—and then to refuse, finally, to keep breathing the air of the sewer as though it were the only air there is.