In an amazing narration reported by Hudhaifa, the Messenger of God (PBUH) said, ‘Verily, I fear about a man from you who will read the Qur’an so much that his face will become enlightened and he will come to personify Islam. This will continue until Allah desires. Then these things will be taken away from him when he will disregard them by putting them all behind his back and will attack his neighbour with the sword accusing him of Shirk. The Prophet was asked which of the two will be deserving of such an accusation? The attacker or the attacked? The Prophet replied, “The attacker (the one accusing the other of Shirk).”’

The strength of the narration is evidenced by its strong narration line and its multiple narrations. It was narrated by Al-Bazar in Musnad, Al-Haythami, Ibn Hibbaan in his Saheeh, Abu Ya’ali in his Musnad, and Al-Tahawi in Sharh Al-Masl Al-Athar. Much of thenarration line of this narrationis valid. There is another version of the narration recorded by Mu’ad Ibn Jabal, which was reported by Al-Tabarani, Yaqoub Ibn Sufyan, Ibn Abi Asim, Al-Harawi and Abu al-Qasim Al-Asbahani.

This narration reveals a phenomenon that is strange to the Muslim Ummah, whose tribulations have increased in the last forty years with the increase of religious mobilization in the Muslim world. It speaks of religious people who each of us would have met or heard about in the Muslim community. These people’s lives witnessed intellectual and spiritual fluctuations that started with their religious change and acquiring religious knowledge and information about the Holy Qur’an, so that its lightening showered them – as the narration (that his face will become enlightened) described them – so that people knew them with piety and the lightening of the Qur’an to the extent that the lightening of the Qur’an could be spotted on their faces, because of their frequent connection with the holy book. People have also known these people by their defence of Qur’an and protecting it from harm, as the prophet described them in his narration (he will come to personify Islam).

But after all this religiosity and the piety that they are known for, and their keenness to take care of tiny issues related to their life and appearance, these people, at some point, live a kind of confusion, because of their extreme deviation that affects their understanding of the holy text. The change that is happening to these people is not at the level of their religiosity or their memorization of the holy Qur’an, or their worship, but rather the level of their understanding and interpretation of the verses of the Holy Quran. They have pride of their understanding of Qur’an because of the long period they spent with it, which made them think they understand its verses and speak about its meanings well, even if they lack the knowledge and the approach to do so. As a result, they come out with a series of misinterpretations and deviations that completely contradict the spirit of the Qur’an and its meanings related to the current situation of Muslims. They accuse Muslims of being infidels based on their interpretations of some verses related to the current situation of Muslims without realizing their real meanings, which Muslim scholars have concluded following centuries of study. Some of them accuse their Muslim fellows of being infidels, as the narration says. Others accuse their society of heresy and their governments of being non-Muslim. Then they declare Jihad and carry the sword to apply what they understood from the book of God. They do so to correct ‘the deviation’ that they claim to see and people cannot. Because the concept of religion in their minds is their exclusive understanding of it, and questioning their understanding is like questioning the Qur’an itself, they accuse people who oppose them of being infidels by issuing decrees that permit their murder, which perhaps, in many cases, violates the interpretation of the Qur’an. They do the same when someone opposes their understanding of issues of politics and society. They think that those who disagree with their views on political matters violate the spirit of religion, which is exclusive to their understanding and choices. We have seen, at the beginning of the appearance of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the executions ISIS members have carried out against people for not merely chanting slogans advocating ISIS politics. Some people were executed because they refused to repeat ISIS’s slogan “The State of Islam will remain,” which ISIS members were repeating, considering this an evidence to justify killing people on the basis they are no longer Muslims, according to their own understanding of religion.

This narration draws our attention to a prophetic analysis of the phenomenon of extremism that plagued the Muslim community a few years after the death of the Prophet peace be upon him, represented in the movement of Kharijites, which literally embodied the stages of the birth of extremists and radical thoughts. It also draws our attention to an accurate analysis of the current situation of Muslims. Today, extremism became strong as the Muslim world has been torn down in the last four decades. The pace of extremism and exaggeration in religion has increased, by people who have increased their condemnation of others, and whose religiosity has gone beyond the educational and spiritual submission of the self to arrogance and extremism, which leads to radicalism and bloodshed.

*Dr.Tarik Ladjal is Professor of History at Effat University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia