FAITH AND COMMUNITY

Some scholars labored to construct a logically consistent methodology of the law and to elaborate the detail and scope of its coverage. Others, working upon the same raw data, strove to define the nature of belief and to find answers to questions concerning the nature of Allah. These answers were, in turn, relevant to questions concerning the individual's freedom of action in this world and fate in the hereafter. The beginnings of these inquiries in the second half of the first/seventh century are not easily distinguished from the first tentative steps taken in a number of other disciplines which came to comprise the Islamic sciences; in one way or another, these sciences were concerned with the facts and context of the prophetic-revelatory event and with grasping its meaning and implications for correct belief and proper action in the post-prophetic period.

A famous hadith, included by both al-Bukhari and Muslim in their collections, recounts an incident in Muhammad's lifetime as narrated by ʿUmar b. al-Khattab, later to become the community's second Caliph after the Prophet's death. ʿUmar said: