SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND SUFIS 97
ogous one in classical sources and derive a judgment parallel to the one al-
ready made. And if ambiguities arose about the way to apply qiyas, the
matter was settled by ijma, the consensus of the community-which re-
ally meant the consensus of all the recognized scholars of the time. Such
a consensus could guarantee the veracity of an interpretation because
Prophet Mohammed had once said, "My community will never agree on
an error. "
If a scholar had exhausted Qur'an, hadith, qiyas, and ijma, then and
only then could he move on to the final stage of ethical and legislative
thinking, ijtihad, which means "free independent thinking based on rea-
son." Scholars and judges could apply this type of thinking only in areas
not derived directly from revelation or covered by established precedents.
And over the centuries, even those cracks grew narrower, because once
an eminently qualified scholar weighed in on some subject, his pro-
nouncements also joined the canon. Scholars who came later had to mas-
ter not just Qur'an, hadith, authentication, qiyas, and ijma, but also this
ever-growing corpus of precedents. Only then were they qualified to exer-
cise ijtihad!
In this way, an architectonic code took shape by the end of the third
century AH, a set of proscriptions and prescriptions, obligations, recom-
mendations, and warnings, guidelines, rules, punishments, and rewards
covering every aspect of life from the grandest social and political ques-
tions to the minutest minutiae of daily life such as personal hygiene, diet,
and sexual activity. This bill of particulars marks out the shari'a. The word
comes from a cognate meaning "path'' or "way," and shari' a refers to some-
thing bigger than "Islamic law." It is the whole Islamic way of life, which
is not something to be developed but something to be discovered, as im-
mutable as any principle of nature. All the specific legal points elaborated
by scholars and jurists are markers that reveal this "path to Allah," the way
stones, signs, and guideposts might show a traveler where the path is amid
the brambles and brush of a wilderness.
On the Sunni side, four slightly different versions of this code took
shape, and the Shi'i developed yet another one of their own, similar to the
Sunni ones in spirit and equally vast in scope. These various codes differ in
details, but I doubt that one Muslim in a thousand can name even five
such details.