and the reliance of al-Qadi (1) and those like you is simply to press the opponent for evidence, to fault whatever he puts forward (2), and, where possible, to undermine the proof he cites. Yet even if his proof were sound, such criticism does not yield certain knowledge that his claim is false unless a separate argument establishing its negation is produced.

The principal argument advanced by the later imām Ibn al-Khaṭīb (3) is to invoke the doctrine of jabr (determinism). This, however, is one of the most defective proofs, for jabr—whether true or false—no more cancels a ruling of the Sacred Law than it does judgments that are known by reason; by the same token, it cannot invalidate the rulings affirmed by the Divine Lawgiver.

After him, al-Āmidī’s (4) chief contention is that moral goodness and badness are transient accidents, and that an accident cannot inhere in another accident.

Such reasoning is a sophistry that only an ignorant person—or one who deliberately mingles truth with falsehood—would cite as evidence. What is said concerning the attributes of any other accident applies here as well; at most, both the accident and its quality subsist in the same substrate. Denying judgments that are rationally self-evident is an innovation which scholars of hadith, jurisprudence, and Sunnah have listed among the novel doctrines introduced by al-Ashʿarī—among them Abū Naṣr al-Sijzī and Abū al-Qāsim Saʿd ibn ʿAlī al-Zanjānī (5).