The Prophet Muhammad (sas) said: 'There will be a time when Knowledge will be absent.' Ziad ibn Labid said: 'How could knowledge become absent, when we repeat the Quran, and teach it to our children, and so on until the Last Day?' The Prophet Muhammad (sas) answered: "You amaze me Ziad, for I thought that you were the chief of the learned of Medina. Do the People of the Book (Jews and Christians) not read the Torah and the Gospels without understanding anything of their real meaning?"
People often show an incapacity to differentiate between religion and government. While this shows an astonishing lack of imagination on their part, it is understandable. There is a human propensity to attempt to codify religion to the point where its essential nature becomes indistinguishable from government.
When this happens, the essence of religion is diluted, and deviates from itself. Government is primarily concerned with imposing stability upon chaos. At worst, it concentrates its energies upon the acquisition of power and wealth to eliminate anything that contradicts its own unilateralism. This extremism is diametrically opposed to the essence of religion, because religion must attempt to join humanity, individually and collectively, to a state of being beyond and superior to logic without ever cancelling or contradicting the essence of logic and reason. All religion points toward this, but the government cannot tolerate this. It cannot even correctly define it. The religious experience is by its nature spontaneous. Government, on the other hand, is concerned with laws which suppress the urge toward the spontaneity of joy, and the praise and yearning for Divinity.
All political ideology inevitably degenerates into an aggregate of personality traits and psychological anomalies. And when religion attempts to become government (as opposed to government attempting to become religion, which happens only in external appearance) faith and certainty from inner vision is replaced with ceremony, and misunderstood symbolism replaces organic and holistic morality.