Judge any community by what happens when you try to leave it. A society you may enter with a sentence and cannot leave with your life is a garrison, whatever it calls itself. And a people who cannot leave cannot speak, for every honest word is spoken in sight of the door and with knowledge of what it costs to walk through.
The Rope
In June of 632 the Prophet died in Medina, and within weeks his state began to come apart.
Across Arabia, tribes that had submitted to him in his last years decided that their agreement had been with the man and had ended with his death. Some followed rival prophets who had sprung up in imitation. Many more simply stopped sending the alms tax to Medina. They were willing, they said, to go on praying. They had no intention of going on paying.
The old companion who had been chosen to lead the community, Abu Bakr, was a mild man in his sixties, and his own advisers urged him to be mild now. The treasury was empty and the army was away in the north. Umar, the fiercest of the companions, is said to have asked him how he could make war on people who still testified that there was no god but God.
Abu Bakr's answer was preserved by the tradition and became law. By God, he said, I will fight anyone who separates the prayer from the tax. If they withhold from me so much as a rope they used to give the Messenger of God, I will fight them for it.
He did. In a year of ruthless campaigning his generals broke every tribe that had withdrawn, and Arabia was sewn back together. The Muslim historians gave those campaigns a name that has echoed ever since. They called them the Wars of Apostasy.
5 more minutes: Interpretation, How It Works Now, The Wall, The Lesson
Members read every case to the end and watch each film before release. The complete argument is also in the book.