their difference in sound. Likewise, we cannot summon into our hearts a multitude of meanings at one and the same instant, whether those meanings differ or are identical. True, we may be able to hold in our hearts more meanings than we can simultaneously articulate with our tongues, for the heart is unquestionably more capacious than the body; yet everyone finds within himself that many meanings cannot converge there in a single moment, just as one cannot combine (1) two sounds in a single organ at once. Measuring sounds against meanings—the latter being their exact counterparts and the moulds that give them form—is far sounder than measuring them against colours.

What our opponents oblige us to accept concerning meanings—namely, that the command, the prohibition, and the informative statement are all but one single meaning—does no less violence to the intuitive mind than saying that there is but one letter which is both “bāʾ” and “sīn.” (2) If they will not say the latter, though it is its true analogue, then it is surely more rational to allow the coexistence of those two letters in one locus than to claim that the command is the very prohibition and that both are the statement. Indeed, to affirm that two contradictory attributes can subsist together in a single locus is nearer to reason than to assert that one of them is the other. Whoever alleges that speech consists of the command, the prohibition, and the informative statement, and that all of them together reside in a single subject, how can he balk at saying that their very letters may likewise be gathered (3) in one place?

A further corroboration of our view lies in the foundational principle of al-Qāḍī Abū Bakr—the champion of his school—that naskh (abrogation) is nothing other than the removal of the ruling itself; this is also the position chosen by al-Ghazālī (4) and upheld by Ibn ʿAqīl.