In 1982 Arthur Scargill was elected president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Britain’s oldest and most illustrious industrial union. A revolutionary left-wing socialist, his overriding aim since assuming office has been to use his union as a tool for destabilising the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. He has made repeated attempts to organize a national strike of the mineworkers which would succeed in bringing down the government, as happened with Edward Heath’s government in 1974. But he has never been able to gain the 55% support of his union required for strike action. Unable to achieve his aims by democratic means he then resorted to letting areas which support his policy—like Yorkshire and Scotland—picket other areas, thus forcing them to strike whether they like it or not. Though a ballot showed that a massive majority of miners opposed a national coal strike, strike action was imposed on them, in March 1984, by the leadership and militant minority that supports its policies.

The first victim of Mr. Scargill’s strategy has been his own union. Bitter antagonism has developed between those who resisted the strike, and those who supported it and forced others to join in. As Keith Harper writes in The Guardian it is going to be a hard job “to restore the unity and end the divisions which the leadership’s tactics have so far produced...In the end, Mr. Scargill may say he pointed the way and nobody cared to follow, but at what cost to the structure and stability of the greatest union this country has produced?”

Exactly the same fate as has befallen Mr. Scargill’s union has befallen Muslim movements in modern times. These movements have all made it their aim to destabilize and unseat governments and rulers. All their efforts have centred around this central objective. First of all their struggle was directed against foreign colonial powers. Then, when the age of colonialism came to an end, they diverted their anger to those Muslim leaders and monarchs whom they considered to be practicing tyrannical and unislamic methods.

This policy has had serious repercussions within the Muslim community itself. Some have supported the rulers whom these movements have risen up against; others have thrown their weight behind those attempting to overthrow the present government, and sought to replace it with an “upright Islamic” one. The Muslims have thus been beset by seemingly irreparable internal strife and conflict.

The supreme irony of this situation is that the verse of the Quran which the leaders of these movements use to justify their action is in fact warning the Muslims against the very disunity which has sprung from their disruptive policies. The verse is as follows:

He has ordained for you the faith which He enjoined on Noah and which We have revealed to you, and which We enjoined on Abraham, Moses and Jesus, saying: ‘Observe this faith and be not divided therein.’ (42:13)

These Muslim revolutionaries take the words “observe this faith” to indicate the establishment of an Islamic state. But they do not see that the opposite of observance of faith is cited as being “divided therein,” and this division is exactly what their efforts to establish an “Islamic state” are causing. Neither do they see that it is the observance of the religion of all the prophets—the basic tenets of faith that all of them taught—that is being enjoined in this verse not, quite clearly, the establishment of an “Islamic state,” which is certainly not a mission common to all the prophets.

The Quran goes on to say (42:14) that “they became divided only after knowledge had reached them, out of envy among themselves.” Indeed it would seem that those who sow the seeds of disunity among their own ranks after both human experience and divine revelation have warned them of the dire consequences of their actions, can only do so for one reason alone: because they are envious of the power that is in others’ hands and seek to obtain it for themselves. They should know that power in the next, eternal world of God is for those who relinquish all pretence to it in this ephemeral world, and acknowledge the power of one God alone. □