The relevance of religion and the response to it: a study of religious perceptions in early Islam

What did the Muslim citizen of the classical Islamic world mean by Islam? In what sense was it operative in his life? To what extent did an Islamic slogan signify religious commitment? The difficulty in treating these questions consists in the fact of the variety, not the dearth of answers to them. Rather than develop alternative perspectives, however, we would, in what follows, focus our study on one aspect of the life of the Muslim Umma. This is the problem of the dynamics underlying revolt, rebellion, social protest and revolution in early Islam; with reference to this aspect we would ask our basic questions. In a sense, the three questions could be resolved into one: to what extent, in what sense, and why, was Islam a factor in Muslim revolts during the first centuries? Two propositions would help treat this question, and in the course of the study, we would see if a third may also be legitimately articulated. They are as follows: first, it is possible that the disaffected Muslims in classical and medieval Islam may have tended to translate their mundane grievances into religous terms so that, for instance, the perceived threat to a particular dispensation, or the actual destruction of such a dispensation may have been interpreted as a threat to religion itself; and second, Islam may have been interpreted as the best form of propriety and justice so that those whofeltthemselves deprived considered it incumbent to fight for such justice, not necessarily because it would benefit them but because this was what Islam was, it being considered obligatory to strengthen, save, or reestablish Islam.