SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND SUFIS 93
But the moment Mohammed died, Muslims had to ask themselves,
"What exactly are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to do it?
When we pray, should we hold our hands up here or down lower? In
preparing for prayer, must we wash our feet all the way to the shins or
would just to the ankles be enough?"
And, of course, there was a lot more to being a Muslim than the five
pillars. Beyond individual duties such as fasting, alms, and the testament
of faith, there was the social aspect of Islam, a person's obligations to the
community, the good-citizenship behaviors that fed into making the com-
munity an instrument of God's will. For example, there was certainly a
proscription against drinking. Certainly Muslims had some obligation to
defend the community with their lives and fortunes when necessary in the
obligation famously called jihad. In general, making sacrifices for the com-
munal good devolved upon every Muslim because the community might
not otherwise endure, and to many if not most Muslims, the community
was the template of a new world, charged with an obligation to set a con-
tinuous example of how all people should live. Anyone, therefore, who
contributed to the health of the community was doing God's work, and
anyone who fell short was misbehaving. But what contributed to the
health of the community? And how much contribution was enough?
Once Mohammed died, Muslims had to bring their obligations into
focus and get the details down in writing to secure their faith from drift,
divergence, and the whims of the powerful. That's why the first two khal-
ifas collected every scrap of Qur'an in one place and why the third khalifa
created that single authorized edition.
But the Qur'an did not explicitly address many questions that cropped
up in real life. As a matter of fact, most of the Holy Book spoke in very
general terms: Stop sinning; behave yourself; have a heart; you will be
judged; hell is an awful place; heaven is wonderful; be grateful for all that
God has given you; trust in God; obey God; yield to God-such is the gist
of the message one gets from much of the Holy Book. Even where the
Qur'an gets specific, it is often open to interpretation.
And "interpretation" portended trouble. If everyone were allowed to in-
terpret the ambiguous passages for themselves, their conclusions might di-
verge wildly. People would move apart in as many different directions as
there were people, the community would fragment, and the world might