Destroying the Idols, and the Freedom of Worship in an Islamic State

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

In the roughly six months between the Siege of Ṭāʾif and the Expedition of Tabūk, the Prophet ﷺ sent out seven or eight small expeditions in which he himself did not take part, sending Companions to neighboring tribes and lands both to bring the remaining tribes into Islam and to destroy the great public idols. Ṭufayl ibn ʿAmr was sent against Dhū al-Kaffayn; ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib against al-Fuls, the idol of Ṭayy; and others were toppled likewise.

❧Only after authority was established

This is a crucial point against those who cite such incidents to justify destroying sacred sites today. The Prophet ﷺ did not begin his daʿwah by smashing the idols on the Kaʿbah, he tore down idols only after twenty years of preaching, once Makkah was conquered and political authority over central Arabia was firmly his. These groups want to start at the very point that can only come last.

❧Freedom of worship for others

By consensus, Jews and Christians may practice their faith in an Islamic state, the Qurʾān is explicit. The dispute among the schools concerns pagan, non-Ahl-al-Kitāb religions outside Arabia. By near-consensus no public idolatry is tolerated within Jazīrat al-ʿArab, the Peninsula has a special status, and the Prophet ﷺ said on his deathbed, أَخْرِجُوا الْيَهُودَ وَالنَّصَارَى مِنْ جَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَب, that two religions may not flourish openly there (small, non-public communities aside). Outside Arabia, the madhāhib differ. Some restricted protected (dhimmī) status to Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, the latter included because ʿUmar, on conquering Persia, ordered they be treated like Ahl al-Kitāb and take the jizyah, though they do not share our God (they hold to Ahura Mazda and Ahriman). But the Ḥanafī school, and narrations in the Mālikī and Ḥanbalī, argued by qiyās: if even the Zoroastrians, who do not worship our God, are tolerated, why stop there? So non-Arab pagans have the same exception.

❧How the Ummah actually governed

Historically this tolerant view is what the Umayyads, Abbasids, Ottomans, Seljuks, and the Mughals all practised, every civil minority was left alone. It is why bizarre sects survived in the Muslim heartland: the Druze and Alawites (not regarded as Muslims, attacked only when they themselves turned violent), and the Yazidis of Iraq, whose ṣūfī founder ʿAdī ibn Musāfir (d. c. 532 AH) was righteous, but whose followers drifted into venerating a fallen-then-repentant Iblīs as "the Peacock Angel" (al-Ṭāwūs). They arose and endured in the very heart of the Abbasid caliphate, tolerated. The shaykh knows of no famous case of a caliphate exterminating an entire religion merely for disagreeing with it. The rule: tolerate others' beliefs so long as the shirk is kept within their own places of worship, not paraded in the public square, the opposite of the extremism of modern idol-smashing groups.