Our Ummah between the Healthy State of Shar'i Denominationalism and Unsound Fanatic Sectarianism and Islamic Unity
The title is a research paper by At Tall B.H. published in “RISALATUT-TAQRIB” 2010, Volume -, Number 78; Page(s) 85 To 96. The following is an excerpt from its abstract.[1]
Unity of Ummah
Whenever our Ummah wastes its unity it forfeits too, a lot of the duties of its religion firstly, and wastes the requisites of its own world secondly. This is because unity is the secret of its strength and its capacity of undertaking its message tasks. One of its preliminaries is communicating Islam to the whole of mankind. Then it will be the witness upon them, and the condition of this witness necessitates that it should always be present and active. Of course, when the Ummah misses its unity it will lose its ability of acting or action, then it will lose its presence. For this reason, the jurisprudents of the Ummah have agreed on killing that who goes out of the Islamic society, and forsakes its ranks, while sowing seeds of hostility and discord among them. We do not exaggerate if we say that when the Muslims waste or miss their unity, it will indicate clearly a misunderstanding of their religion and the overwhelming of their ignorance on their minds and mentality. Because, Islam is primarily the religion of Tawhid (Monotheism) and eventually, it is the religion of strong unity. As a matter of fact, no rite of the religion is void of factors of urging and calling for unity, and educating its followers on it. Thus, congregational prayers are the most preferable ones in religion. And fasting (siyam) is specified unitarian worship regarding its appointed dates and periods of time, so the case is with the hajj (pilgrimage).
Role of fanaticism
In fact, fanaticism caused by some followers of a sect is not confined to excluding of the followers of another school of Shari'ah unfairly from the whole religion. But it has surpassed what is more perilous when the followers of one sect have started to send away out of religion some others of the same sect when they differ with them on some religious issues. Regretfully, this matter has been repeated several times in the history of Muslims. But its causes, reasons and symptoms are almost the same. The first of them is their ignorance of Islam and misunderstanding of it fully as we have mentioned before. Secondly we see too, whatever results from ignorance, like fanaticism which causes blindness to see the right and truth, and prepare the proper grounds for the accusing the Muslims of disbelief, by which the Islamic Ummah is afflicted in many stages of its history.
Role of politicians
This will happen continuously when the politicians exploit this sectarian difference so as to protect their interests and privileges. They will do that by distracting the Ummah from these political and non-political corruptions through the sectarian difference, which may transform fanaticism into a plague inflicting the Ummah with a terrible image of sectarianism. That is to say, they take the sect from being healthy denomination into a bad, diseased state whose one of the most important symptoms is fanaticism, which is based on ignorance producing dissension, and discord that transform good Shar'i denominationalism into "hateful fanatic sectarianism".