SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND SUFIS 103
ples of nature belong to science, the realm of moral and ethical value be-
longs to religion and philosophy.
In ninth and tenth century Iraq {as in classical Greece), science as such
did not exist to be disentangled from religion. The philosophers were giv-
ing birth to it without quite realizing it. They thought of religion as their
field of inquiry and theology as their intellectual specialty; they were on a
quest to understand the ultimate nature of reality. That {they said) was
what both religion and philosophy were about at the highest level. Any-
thing they discovered about botany or optics or disease was a by-product
of this core quest, not its central object. As such, philosophers who were
making discoveries about botany, optics, or medicine did not hesitate to
pronounce on questions we moderns would consider theological and quite
outside the purview of, say, a chemist or a veterinarian--questions such as
this one:
If a man commits a grave sin, is he a non-Muslim, or is he (just) a bad
Muslim?The question might seem like a semantic game, except that in the Mus-
lim world, as a point of law, the religious scholars divided the world be-
tween the community and the nonbelievers. One set of rules applied
among believers, another set for interactions between believers and nonbe-
lievers. It was important, therefore, to know if any particular person was in
the community or outside it.
Some philosophers who took up this question said Muslims who were
grave sinners might belong to a third zone, situated between belief and un-
belie£ The more rigid, mainstream scholars didn't like the idea of a third
zone, because it suggested that the moral universe wasn't black-and-white
but might have shades of gray.
Out of this third-zone concept developed a whole school of theolo-
gians called the Mu'tazilites, Arabic for "secessionist," so called because
they had seceded from the mainstream of religious thought, at least ac-
cording to the orthodox ulama. Over time, these theologians formulated
a coherent set of religious precepts that appealed to the philosophers.
They said the core of Islam was the belief in tawhid: the unity, singleness,
and universality of Allah. From this, they argued that the Qur'an could