﴿وَلَوْلَا دَفْعُ اللَّهِ النَّاسَ بَعْضَهُمْ بِبَعْضٍ لَفَسَدَتِ الْأَرْضُ وَلَٰكِنَّ اللَّهَ ذُو فَضْلٍ عَلَى الْعَالَمِينَ﴾
And were it not for God repelling some people by means of others, the earth would have been corrupted; but God is full of bounty to all the worlds.
Pushing back is one of God’s laws in human society: where it is absent the earth is corrupted, and where it is understood a person stops being the subject of events and becomes a party to them.
Three doors to one idea
The Law of Pushing Back
A book in eighteen chapters that grounds the law in the Quran and the Sunnah and follows it through history, the self and society, and on into knowledge, the state and the future.
Read more The MagazineAl-Tadafuʿ
A journal of ideas that reads scattered fields through a single lens. Every article opens with a true, sourced story and ends with the limits of what it can claim.
Read more VideosYouTube
A video series on YouTube, each episode tied to a chapter of the book or an issue of the magazine.
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From the book’s cases
Every chapter of the book opens with one or more stories from history, near and far. The book holds forty-one of them.
- 2
The Battle of Salamis
The Greek few against Persian might
- 9
Bouazizi
When a single image sets a continent alight
- 16
The fall of apartheid
When injustice becomes a witness against itself
- 30
Galileo
When the telescope becomes a weapon
- 38
Lithuania and the Baltic Way
When a human chain breaks the shackles of empire
- 41
Malek Bennabi
When an idea is an army