its corruption and invalidity, for he said in Nihāyat al-ʿUqūl (1), speaking on behalf of his own followers:

“We do not concede that it is impossible (2) for one and the same utterance to be both a report and a request. The explanation (3) is this: suppose a man says to one of his servants, ‘Whenever I say to you, “Do,” know that I am asking you to perform the act’; says to another, ‘Whenever I utter this wording, know that I am asking you to refrain’; and says to a third, ‘Whenever I utter this wording, know that I am informing you that the universe is originated’ (4). If all of them are present together and he addresses them simultaneously with that wording, that single formulation (5) is at once a command, a prohibition, and a report (6). If this can be comprehended in what is witnessed, then let its counterpart (7) be comprehended with respect to what is unseen.

He then said (8): ‘This is weak (9), because the word “Do!” is not, in itself, either a request or a report; rather, it is a formulation devised (10) to convey the sense of a request or the sense of a report. There is no impossibility in using one and the same thing as evidence for different realities; the impossibility lies only in one thing actually being those different realities. Our discussion concerns the very reality of a report and the very reality of a request (11), and a detailed treatment of this is set out in the chapter on command in the book al-Maḥṣūl on the principles of jurisprudence.’”}​