SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND SUFIS 99
was no license, no certificate, no "shingle" to hang up to prove that one
was an alim. The ulama were (and are) a self-selecting, self-regulating class,
bound entirely by the river of established doctrine. No single alim could
modify this current or change its course. It was too old, too powerful, too
established, and besides, no one could become a member of the ulama
until he had absorbed the doctrine so thoroughly that it had become a part
of him. By the time a person acquired the status to question the doctrine,
he would have no inclination to do so. Incorrigible dissenters who simply
would not stop questioning the doctrine probably wouldn't make it
through the process. They would be weeded out early. The process by
which the ulama self-generates makes it an inherently conservative class.
THE PHILOSOPHERS
The ulama, however, were not the only intellectuals of Islam. While they
constructed the edifice of doctrine, another host of thoughtful Muslims
were hard at work on another vast project: interpreting all previous
philosophies and discoveries in light of the Muslim revelations and inte-
grating them into a single coherent system that made sense of nature, the
cosmos, and man's place in all of it. This project generated another group
of thinkers known to the Islamic world as the philosophers.
The expansion of Islam had brought Arabs into contact with the ideas
and achievements of many other peoples including the Hindus of India,
the central Asian Buddhists, the Persians, and the Greeks. Rome was vir-
tually dead by this time, and Constantinople (for all its wealth) had de-
generated into a wasteland of intellectual mediocrity, so the most
original thinkers still writing in Greek were clustered in Alexandria,
which fell into Arab hands early on. Alexandria possessed a great library
and numerous academies, making it an intellectual capital of the Greco-
Roman world.
Here, the Muslims discovered the works ofPlotinus, a philosopher who
had said that everything in the universe was connected like the parts of a
single organism, and all of it added up to a single mystical One, from
which everything had emanated and to which everything would return.
In this concept of the One, Muslims found a thrilling echo of Prophet
Mohammed's apocalyptic insistence on the oneness of Allah. Better yet,