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Spirit of Islam Issue 35 November 2015
God gave different
methods to His
prophets to
accommodate
the different
circumstances.
that method can be proper that takes into account the prevailing
circumstances. For example, Prophet Joseph directly told the
ruler of Egypt “Place in my charge the storehouses of the land”
(THE QURAN 12: 55)
, but Prophet Moses did not make this sort of demand
on the king of that country. On the contrary, he asked for permission
to depart from Egypt, taking along with him his people, the Children of
Israel.
(THE QURAN 26: 17)
It is wrong to claim that the differences in the
shariah
s of different
prophets were on account of evolution—that the rudimentary
shariah
of the earlier prophets kept getting refined till the finally-evolved
shariah
was given to the final prophet, the Prophet Muhammad.
The above cited Quranic verse rebuts the evolutionary explanation of
different
shariahs
to different prophets. According to the Quran, the
differences in the
shariah
are on the basis of God’s testing people, and
not on account of the supposed evolution of
shariah
laws.
Every act of worship has a spirit as well as
an external form. Those who gather around
a prophet and adopt a life of faith know this
difference, and hence are more particular
about the spirit of worship. But in later
generations, stagnation gradually sets in, and
people lose the inner spirit of worship. The
performance of external forms of worship
in a ritualistic manner is mistaken as true
worship.
When stagnation sets in and a community loses the spirit of worship,
God commands, through His prophets to changes in some external
forms of worship. Thereafter, those who had taken the external forms
to be the real thing continue to cling onto these ancient forms, unable
to adopt the new forms of worship. They even deny the prophets of
their times. But those in whom the spirit of
deen
(religion) is alive give
no importance to the external differences and willingly adopt the new.
This is precisely what happened in ancient Madinah, when, through
Prophet Muhammad, the
qibla
or direction of worship was changed
(2: 142)
.
Such changes in
shariah
are brought about through prophets. Now,
no changes are possible in the external forms of worship that Islam
prescribes, because no new prophet will come. However, as far as
minhaj
or method is concerned, the case is different.