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political islam 353Islamists have turned this threat against the rulers themselves, acommon feature of our current political life.Many factors contributed to this amalgamation of apostasy withpolitics; we name only six:a)b)c)The tendency to idolise people who are mentioned in theauthoritative texts of nascent Islam, to the extent that we aresupposed to emulate their every action and act in our times asthey did thousands of years ago. As a result of this we are facedwith comical situations, such as people insisting on paying theiralms during Ramadan in the form of wheat, exactly as theirforefathers did, because they do not accept money or any othermodern substitute for it. Such excessive veneration of peopleis close to personality cult, which causes people to invent exaggeratedaccounts of their idols’ lives (similar to what we haveseen with the mystics and their almost fanatical veneration ofdubious ‘åfÊ sheikhs).The completely uncritical attitude towards the early history ofIslam, which makes it impossible to assess this period objectivelyaccording to the (political, economic, and military)parameters of its time. Instead, the period of the forefathers isseen as sacrosanct and the writings of the founders of the legalschools are regarded as infallible and untouchable, with theterrible consequence that its historic values (e.g., tribalism,paternalism, male chauvinism, and martialism) have now beentransported into the modern age and are with us all the time(e.g., in the horrendous repression of women and their rightsin marriage, education, and work), and are, in spite of theircontingent origins, praised as absolute standards that are universallyvalid for all times.The enormous influence of cultural traditions whose power isseen as overriding the authority of Allah’s Book. As we haveseen in chapter 5, this is particular harmful in the sphere offamily law where the Book’s insistence on bequests is ignoredin favour of rigid inheritance laws that are applied in such away that they maximise the male shares and minimise thefemale shares to the detriment of all women in the family. Thisagainst the clear rule of Allah that ‘from what is left by parentsand those nearest related there is a share for men and a share