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political islam 329CHAPTER SIXPOLITICAL ISLAMIn order to consider the phenomenon of Political Islam one has toaddress a number of burning questions: does freedom of religionexist in Islam; how is apostasy treated; what is the correct way ‘toprescribe what is right and to proscribe what is wrong’; what is theproper understanding of al-jih§d and ‘fight’; how do we express loyaltyand to what extent is it possible to harmonise differing personal,religious, and political identities? Since the emergence of PoliticalIslam, which has proliferated in the many different streams of theIslamist movement, we have become accustomed to turning to our#ulam§" and asking them how we can make sense of this strange mixtureof religion and politics. Initially, we thought that Islamism wouldbe explained as a deviation from the #ulam§"’s sound scholarly tradition,and we expected the scholars to refute the Islamists and theiraggressive ambitions to politicise Islam and to Islamise the wholeworld. How surprised were we when we heard not a word of condemnationfrom our honourable scholars but instead legal explanationsthat basically condoned the concoctions of the Islamists. Wethen realised that the #ulam§"s interpretations of apostasy, al-jih§d, andal-qit§l were in fact not too different from the Islamists’ positions andthat the deviation from the spirit of Allah’s Book did not just comewith the Islamist movement but that it had occurred much earlierin history, namely during the formative period of Islamicscholarship!To prove this point we have applied a different approach throughoutthis chapter. Instead of turning only to the Book in our analysis,we include ÈadÊth reports, tafsÊr commentaries and ta"rikh narrativesand compare their ideas with those of Allah’s Book. The benefit ofthis method is that we are now able to demonstrate that politicisedIslam is basically an invention of our honourable scholars who aimedat replacing the spiritual message of the Book by a political ideologythat pleased the authoritarian rulers of their times and mobilised themasses for unjustified wars and crimes against humanity.This chapter intends to show how differently the Book talks aboutthose topics that became politicised and militarised by traditionalscholarship. We will show that struggle and fight in God’s way have