96 DESTINY DISRUPTED
second man passed muster too; but when Bukhari went to interview the
third man in the chain of transmission, he found the fellow beating his
horse. That did it. The word of a man who beat his horse could not be
trusted. That hadith had to be discarded.
In short, to gauge the credibility of the people who transmitted aha-
dith, a scholar had to know a great deal about them and about their times.
A scholar also had to know the circumstances in which a hadith was spo-
ken so that its intention might be judged from context. The "science ofha-
dith" thus generated an elaborate discipline of critical historiography.
Some seven or eight decades after Mohammed's death, scholars across
the Muslim world began compiling sifted collections of hadith grouped
under specific topics, which functioned as organized statements oflslamic
doctrine and as reference works on Islamic living. If you wondered, for ex-
ample, what Prophet Mohammed had to say about diet, or clothing, or
warfare, you could look it up in such a book. The enterprise began in late
Umayyad times, but it matured in the Abassid era, and new collections
kept emerging for centuries. (In fact, just last year, a distant Afghan ac-
quaintance sent me a handwritten manuscript he was hoping I would
translate into English. It constituted, he said, a new set of hadith he him-
self had collected-after fourteen centuries.)
Even though new hadith kept emerging, however, six collections
achieved canonical status by the end of the third century AH. These com-
plemented the Qur'an and came to constitute a second level of authority
on the dos, don'ts, shoulds, and shouldn'ts of Muslim life.
Yet even the Qur'an and hadith together failed to give a definitive an-
swer to every real-life question, as you can imagine. Sometimes, therefore,
it was necessary for someone to make an original decision about a disputed
situation. Given the legalistic spirit of Islam, Muslims conceded this right
of original decision making only to scholars who had thoroughly absorbed
Qur'an and hadith and had mastered the "science ofhadith," the discipline
of authentication. Only such folks could be sure their rulings did not con-
tradict some point set forth in the revelations.
Even qualified scholars were to make decisions based strictly on qiyas
or analogical reasoning, the method Khalifa Omar used to discover the
punishment for drinking (and to make many other rulings). That is, for
each unprecedented contemporary situation, scholars had to find an anal-