50 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Whenever a difficult decision came up, Omar looked here for the an-
swer. If the Qur'an didn't provide an answer, he consulted with the com-
munity to find out what the Prophet had said or done in a similar
situation. In this case, "the community" meant the several hundred men
and women who had been Mohammed's "companions" during his life-
time. Every time the community made a ruling in this way, Omar had
scribes record it and sent the ruling out to provincial governors to use as a
basis for their decisions.
Omar funded a body of scholars to spend all their time steeping them-
selves in the revelations, the stories of Mohammed's life, and other perti-
nent data, so that when he needed expert advice he could get it from these
"people of the bench," a seed that grew into one oflslam's major social in-
stitutions, the ulama, or "scholars."
Even as he was shaping Muslim law, Omar was busy applying the doc-
trine to social life in Medina, which brings us to his stern side. Omar had
no tolerance for slackards. For example, he banned drinking outright, even
though the Qur'an had been somewhat ambiguous on this question, seem-
ing in some early verses to disapprove more of drunkenness than of drink-
ing per se (although later verses ban it more definitely).
The Qur'an specified no particular punishment for drinking, but
Omar deduced one by analogy. The analogy in this case went as follows:
the Qur'an prescribed the lash for slander; drinking, said Omar, made a
person spout slander. Therefore, the punishment for drinking must also be
the lash. This mode of argument by analogy (qiyas) created a stencil used
prolifically by later Muslim legal thinkers.
Dreading the destructive power of unlicensed sex, Omar enforced the
sternest measures against adultery. In fact, he mandated stoning for adul-
terers, which is not mentioned in the Qur' an but does appear in the law of
Moses, dating to pre-Qur'anic times (Deuteronomy 22:22}. He also
banned the Arab custom of temporary marriage, which allowed men to
marry women for a few days: the khalifa recognized prostitution when he
saw it. (Shi'ite jurists later relegitimized this practice in their codes.}
Omar's detractors charge him with misogyny, and his rulings do sug-
gest that he held women responsible for the bad behavior of men. To
defuse the disruptive power of sexuality, Omar took measures to regulate
and separate the roles of men and women, mandating, for example, that