Page 160 - UAE Truncal States

The Islamic Basis of Society

decades, for religious strife among the tribal population. Whenever
in the last century there were bitter fights between adherents of the
Wahhabi reform movement and the other Sunnis, the sword was
unsheathed only when tribal politics were also involved. The minor
differences of observances, of moral strictness or leniency, or of ways
of applying sharl'ah, did not detract from the fact that Islam was the
very basis of life both public and private in the society of the area.
Islam was the indestructible, lasting fabric into whose even structure
the pattern of local historical events was printed. Islam being, in the
words of Alfred Bonne, “not only a system of religious elements or
religious and political doctrines, but above all, that civilisation
which . . . has created ... a common culture and philosophy of life
based on a uniform creed and a framework of ideas, political, social
and Stale, derived therefrom,”27 it provided also the basic rules for
family relationships, marriage and burial, prayer and caring for the
poor, how to dress and how to respond to the authority of the Stale,
and how to rule and to dispense jurisdiction.
The different parts of the Islamic world have developed different
adaptations from the same common source of Islamic heritage. In the
Trucial Stales the modest economic opportunities and the prevalence
of the tribal structure of society fostered the uniformity which was
characteristic of this Islamic society. The first Muslims lived in a
tribal environment in the Hijaz which was very similar to the tribal
society of the Trucial Stales, whose very direct, undiluted, unrefined
application of their understanding of the Koran and shari'ah to all
situations in life both public and private came quite naturally,
although it may have appeared to be unsophisticated in the eyes of
the complex Islamic communities of Iraq and Iran.
Islam is not merely a religion in the western sense of the word;
divided into secular and religious spheres, it comprises the purely
spiritual and the speculative, the form and content of devotion and
the order of authority in all matters concerning the faith; Islam also
dominates the cultural, moral, social, economic, legal and political
spheres. Thus, Islam is the inescapable common denominator for life
in a Muslim society; the illiterate nomad, the learned qadi, the
successful pearl merchant and the widow claiming her inheritance, |
they all consciously or unconsciously turn many times during a day
to the same moral, legal and religious authority.
Despite some obvious differences in the way of life in the desert, in
the mountains or by the sea, and the resulting differences in

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