But if they stop...

But if they stop, and try to be cunning so as to save themselves from defeat, and prepare themselves for a new attack, and become unruly again, and, in the words of the Qur'an, "if one of them is insolent against the other", be firm, and do not give way to their cunning. It is up to the poeple themselves to discriminate in all these matters.

The Qur'an seeks that the Muslims should be intellectually and socially mature, and a necessary consequence of such intellectual maturity is the ability to differentiate between the just man and the unjust man. The Qur'an did not come to be always for people like a guardian over a juvenile, to carry out the particular details of their lives like a personal protector, and to specify each special case by a material sign and indicator.

Actually, knowing people, the degree of their competence, the limits to their fitness for, and relationship to, Islam and Islamic realities is itself a duty, and frequently we neglect this duty. `Ali, may peace be upon him, said: You will never know truth and follow the right way unless you know the person who has abandoned it.

[^21] Knowing the principles and the generalities is alone not enough unless their correspondence and reference to particulars has been found, for it is possible that, through an error of judgement concerning persons and individuals or through ignorance of the situation, one will act in the name of truth and Islam and under the banner of Islam against Islam and truth and for Injustice and the unjust, justice and the just are mentioned in the Qur'an, but their applications must be sought out.