As we have seen, medieval Muslims generally held the best polity to be one based on religion because people had to subordinate their individual interests to those of the collectivity when they lived together and could best be made to do so in the name of higher things. The highest of all things were God and the next world. Forming a single polity thus meant submitting to God and whoever represented Him as leader of the polity in question; vice versa, submitting to God meant entering a polity in which God set the rules of human interaction, laying down how one was to behave with other people and with Him.

In other words, revealed religion was first and foremost about collective interests. “Religions are never established for private benefit or individual advantage but always aim at collective welfare,” as al-‘Āmirī noted. “The meaning of religion (dīn) in Arabic is communal obedience to a single leader,” as the Brethren of Purity observed. Modern Westerners, conditioned to thinking about religion as a relationship of spiritual love between God and an individual, or as a set of convictions about the metaphysical world, usually have trouble with this view of things, and of course there was much more to religion than collective organization by the time these statements were made. But whatever else God was about, he stood for common interests, the public order, the Muslims at large.