What is the ruling of the Shari'ah regarding the multiplication of groups and parties? (And a note on the phrase: “What is the opinion of the Shari'ah”)

The questioner : I would like to ask you a question regarding the parties now, like the Tahrir Party, the Muslim Brotherhood Party, and Hezbollah. What is the opinion of the Shari'ah regarding the plurality of parties in the Islamic religion?

The Shaykh : Before I answer your question, I want to draw your attention, and the attention of others who ask and err in their expression in the question, to the fact that you said, “What is the opinion of the Shari'ah regarding the parties?” It is not permissible for you or anyone else to say “What is the opinion of the Shari'ah,” because the Shari'ah does not have an opinion; it has a ruling. Yes, I am correcting your wording, not your intention; I know your intention. Yes, and correcting words is one of the Islamic etiquettes that the Messenger (peace be upon him) came to teach us... Today, many Muslims, especially in this country, swear by other than Allah; they swear by their fathers and their sons. In our country in Syria, I do not know, here it is as if I have not heard of it, but people swear by their beards, even if they have shaved them. They swear by their beards. All of this falls under the prohibition mentioned in his (peace be upon him) saying: And in a narration: or let him be silent. Now, do you hear swearing by other than Allah or not?

The questioner: Yes.

The Shaykh : Do you hear? The Messenger (peace be upon him) is saying: Have these people become polytheists? We also say no, they have not become polytheists. But is this permissible? It is not permissible. Is it permissible to remain silent about swearing by other than Allah? It is not permissible. Is it permissible to remain silent when a Muslim says “What is the opinion of the Shari'ah”? It is not permissible to remain silent. I have an opinion, and he has an opinion, and this oneThe Shaykh : has an opinion. We err and we hit the mark in opinion, but the Wise Lawgiver has a ruling. and so on. After this correction, and I hope it is in your mind, you and others, because every day we repeat this warning due to the spread of this error. On the radio, we hear from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, a question comes from Egypt, from Iraq, from any Islamic country: “What is the opinion of the Shari'ah regarding such and such?” This is wrong. And strangely, they do not point out this error; they answer the question, and the answer is usually correct and right, but they should point out the errorThe questioner : if he erred in his question. After this correction, I say: There are no parties in Islam. That is, it is not prescribed in Islam for there to be parties, and it is not befitting for there to be parties among the Muslims. And although, as it is said:
The Shaykh : “Not everything a man wishes can he attain *** The winds blow with what the ships do not desire,”
The Shaykh : parties today exist, and unfortunately, if only the parties were just two or three. Now, the parties in this town exceed ten parties, or much more. And our Lord, Mighty and Majestic, says in the Noble Qur'an: So this Qur'anic text alone is sufficient to admonish the Muslims and remind them that their obligation is to unite as one block and not to form parties except one party, as He, the Exalted, said: But despite that, due to the deviation of some Muslims from understanding their religion first in the correct way, and if they understand it in the correct way, they deviate from applying it, either by following the desires of the self or sometimes by independent legal reasoning and personal opinions in which they contradict the Shari'ah texts, like this text: What is the matter with the polytheists? And it is observed today, and this is one of the effects of the partisanship prohibited in the Islamic Shari'ah, that every party gathers its group around it, and every good that it can achieve, it deprives all Muslims of it by restricting it to its party. The second party is the same, and the third is the same. And the result is hostility, discord, discord, hatred, and turning away from one another. The Messenger (peace be upon him) prohibited all of that in the authentic hadith, and he concluded it by saying: And my belief is that what drives people to partisanship is their preoccupation with studying Islam from its pure foundations, namely the Book and the Sunnah, and what our righteous predecessors were upon. And therefore, He, the Exalted, said, and with this verse I conclude the answer to this question: And what is the point in the verse? If we asked the Muslims in general, whether they were scholars or students of knowledge or from the general Muslims, “Do you know that there were parties among the previous Muslims?” The answer is no. These parties came to us from the colonizers who colonized our lands and spread their customs, traditions, and ideas among us, including the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and the Democratic Party, and I do not know what else there is. So the one country divided itself into many sections. Then these partisanship ideas, these partisanship ideas that we called socialist, communist, and democratic, are not Islamic at all. But unfortunately, this seeped into the Muslims, so it became like what you said: Muslim Brotherhood, Tahrir Party, Tabligh Group, whatever it is. All of these must unite on a common word, which is Islam, and there is no partisanship in Islam.