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political islam 435ditional main and subclause: ‘if God had not checked…, then theearth…’, implying that the act ‘to check’ (dafa#) 109 prevented the earthfrom becoming corrupt. The first topic refers to a form of competitionthat exists within human societies, a kind of mutual rivalry whichmakes people push one another to reach higher goals. This mutualcompetition is a socio-communal disposition that God has instilledin His creation. The phrase ‘one set of people’ cannot be reducedto a specific group of people (e.g., the believers, or the army of thecaliph), but remains generic, meaning exactly what it says: ‘one setof people’ that remains undefined. The Arabic term for ‘to check"—in the sense of ‘to drive back’—is dafa#, a three-radical, transitiveverb that requires a direct object, while the term for a ‘mutual push’is tad§fa#a, a four-radical verb that requires two sides that are bothsubject and object, because it implies a process of simultaneouslypushing and being pushed. Al-qit§l describes a similar competitionbetween two sides, but, in contrast to al-tad§fu#, it might culminatein a violent battle between two armed opponents resulting in potentiallyhigh numbers of casualties, either wounded or dead. But mutualcompetition does not always have to be violent or deadly. Al-tad§fu#refers, for example, to the fight between sickness and health that weobserve every day in hospitals, clinics, and the consultation roomsof medical centres; it refers to the fight between consumers and theretail industry over the best price and the best service possible; itrefers to the fight between two opposing teams on the football fieldor the cricket ground; it stands for the fight between two rival partiesin a lawsuit in the Magistrates Court where the only weapon allowedis a better argument and a more convincing piece of evidence, notguns or rocket-propelled grenades. Al-tad§fu# refers to the competitionbetween universities for attracting better funding for their researchinstitutes and for achieving a higher ranking than their competitors;it refers to the fight for a more successful advertising campaign thanthat of a rival company that operates in the same sector of the mar-109The translators’ renderings are all expressing MS’s notion of a mutual competitionprovided that phrases like ‘to check on others’, ‘to drive some back’, ‘to repelothers’, ‘to deter one another’, etc., are not understood in a physical or military way;AH: ‘If God did not drive some back by means of others’; MF: ‘Had Allah notcaused some people to repel others’; AA: ‘Had God not driven back the people,some by the means of others’; AhA: ‘If God did not make men deter one another’;MP: ‘if Allah had not repelled some men by others’; AB: ‘If it were not for Allah’sdriving some people back by means of others’.