these partisan loyalties are a torment that Allah has loosed upon those who turn away from His law and repudiate His religion, as He, exalted is He, says: “Say: He is able to send upon you a punishment from above you or from beneath your feet, or to divide you into factions and make you taste the violence of one another” (al-Anʿām 6:65). The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “Whenever their leaders fail to judge by the Book of Allah, Allah turns their might against one another.” (1)

Fanatical partisanship drives people to reject the truth that others possess, just as the Jews did, about whom Allah said: “When it is said to them, ‘Believe in what Allah has revealed,’ they answer, ‘We believe only in what was revealed to us,’ and they deny what came after it, though it is the truth confirming what they have” (al-Baqarah 2:91). The same was true of the people of the Age of Ignorance, who refused the truth brought by the Messenger ﷺ out of blind loyalty to their forefathers: “When it is said to them, ‘Follow what Allah has revealed,’ they say, ‘Rather, we will follow that upon which we found our fathers’” (al-Baqarah 2:170).

The partisans of these factions now seek to make them a substitute for Islam, the very faith with which Allah has graced humanity.