66 DESTINY DISRUPTED
grasp the whole of it, as Mohammed had done. The Prophet's immediate
successors were like the six blind men trying to discern whether the ele-
phant was more like a rope, a wall, a pillar, or what. All the struggles over
the khalifate in the period of the Rightly Guided Ones had theological
meaning because the issues they struggled with were essentially theologi-
cal. After Ali's death, the khalifate was just an empire.