94 DESTINY DISRUPTED
swallow up the pieces and who was to say the great revelation would not
then vanish as if it had never been?
THE SCHOLARS
Clearly Muslims had to come to unified agreements about the ambiguous
passages and do it fast, while the original excitement still burned in commu-
nal memory. No one in that early time wanted to offer a personal interpre-
tation of the Truth backed only by his or her reason. If reason were enough,
revelation would never have been needed. Certainly, none of the early khal-
ifas laid claim to any such authority. They were devout people who refused
to tamper with instructions from God. Their humble modesty was precisely
what made them great. They wanted to get the instructions exactly right in
letter and spirit-and by "right," they meant, "exactly as God intended."
From the start, therefore, Muslims tried to rely on their memories of
the Prophet to fill in any gaps in the Qur'an's guidelines. It was Omar who
really set the course here. Whenever a question came up for which no ex-
plicit answer could be found in the Qur'an, he asked, "Did Mohammed
ever have to deal with a situation like this one? What did he decide?"
Omar's approach got people motivated to collect everything Mo-
hammed had ever said and done, quotations and anecdotes known to
Muslims as hadith. But many people had heard Mohammed say many
things. Which ones were credible? Some quotations contradicted other
quotations. Some people might have been making stuff up. Who could
tell? And some, it turned out, hadn't actually heard a quotation themselves,
but had it only on good authority-or so they claimed, which of course
raised the question, who was the original source? Was that person reliable?
What about the other people who had transmitted it? Were they all reli-
able? What, finally, constituted a "good authority?"
Omar, as I mentioned, established a body of full-time scholars to ex-
amine such questions, thereby establishing a consequential precedent: be-
fore Islam had a standing army of professional soldiers, it had a standing
army of professional scholars (called "people of the bench'' or sometimes
"people of the pen").
Hadith, however, proliferated faster than any small group of scholars
could control. New ones were constantly coming to light. By Umayyad