ABSTRACT
The first part of this dictum on the problema tics of political power would certainly find echoes in Islam. The second would be an apt observation on the violence of 9/11. Ever since the crucial Hijrah of the Prophet and the early converts to Islam from Mecca to Medina, Muslim religion has been committed to, and reliant on, a religious marriage with political power. The logic of that watershed in Muhammad's Sirah, from which, significantly, the Muslim Hijri calendar begins, could well be caught in an adaptation of Matthew 6.33: 'Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else shall be added to you,'2 except that 'first' - in the same Sirah there had been the thirteen exclusively 'religious' years in Mecca. They were years in which the Prophet was told many times: 'Your sole responsibility is the balagh, the message you utter.'3 During that defining period of the 'essential Islam of the word' he had neither sought nor enjoyed the luxury of power. On the contrary, he had been physically vulnerable and in heavy soul-distress from the bitter scorn and hostility of his Meccan populace, to whom he seemed an upstart and a renegade, a menace to the pagan status quo. 'In truth you are vexing your very soul in grief over the way they are,' we read in Surah 18.6. It will always be a question for the Islamic mind whether that Meccan situation requires to be held finally determinative of Islam, as having not merely chronological but essential priority over all else.
