That very deficiency would remain were he given no more than a single mouthful of food. In the same way, when he says, “Oppose them,” absolute opposition cannot coexist with concord in some or most matters on an equal footing, for absolute opposition is the direct antithesis of absolute agreement. Thus, a command to adopt one necessarily entails a prohibition of the other. One cannot therefore claim that opposition has been achieved merely by differing in a single matter, just as one cannot say that agreement has been attained merely by matching them in one thing.

The crux of the issue lies in distinguishing between the meaning of a word when it is used without qualification and the purely abstract meaning that may be derived from the word as such. A term may be employed both unrestrictedly and with qualifications. If you consider the meaning common to all its occurrences—qualified and unqualified—that meaning is broader than what the word conveys when left unrestricted. This generic meaning is realized whenever any of the word’s referents is present in any of its uses, whether restricted or unrestricted. By contrast, the meaning it bears when uttered absolutely is not fully realized once the term is qualified; it implies many things that the restricted expression does not.

This is precisely where many people slip. Do you not see how the jurists distinguish between “unqualified water” (māʾ muṭlaq) and the sheer property of “water-ness” that exists in semen, altered water, and other liquids?

Accordingly, when you specify, “Honor the guest by giving him this dirham,” that is a restricted form of honoring. But when you simply say, “Honor the guest,” you are issuing a command based on the unrestricted sense of the word, and that entails a number of actions