be far greater than the benefit of deterring him from drinking wine and sexual immorality, if he does these things in secret and does not thereby wrong anyone else. Here, the greater of the two evils is averted by tolerating the lesser. Concerning such cases, the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said:

“Allah supports this religion through a wicked man and through people who have no share in the Hereafter.”

Such a soldier is censured or reprimanded for his inability to undertake jihad or his negligence in it in a way that someone not assigned to jihad is not.

The same applies to the scholars who preserve the Book and the Sunnah for the Muslim community, both in wording and in meaning. Preserving them is a collective obligation upon the community as a whole, while some of this knowledge is individually obligatory: the knowledge that each Muslim must possess concerning his own personal affairs. Nevertheless, this obligation, both individual and collective, weighs more heavily upon scholars who have attained leadership in this field or receive stipends for it than upon others. This is because it is a general obligation under religious law, and it may become individually binding upon them because they are capable of fulfilling it while others are not.

Such capability includes intellectual aptitude, prior study, familiarity with the means of acquiring knowledge—written works, earlier scholars, and the various other sources of evidence—and the freedom to devote themselves to it without the preoccupations that occupy others.

Thus, the Sunnah has established that embarking upon the pursuit of knowledge or jihad makes its continuation binding, just as embarking upon Hajj does. This means that, with regard to the religious knowledge and knowledge of jihad he has retained, he is not permitted to