concern anything other than particular instances existing in concrete reality; it does not concern a universal meaning.”

He said: “Even if we concede that the command concerns the shared universal meaning called ‘sale,’ then, when the person commanded performs one of its particular instances, he has performed what is designated by the term ‘sale’ that he was commanded to carry out.”

[Ibn Taymiyya’s Commentary]

I say:

This second point is correct: whoever performs one of the particular instances has performed what he was commanded to do. However, the majority, who hold that his sale at a grossly unfair price is invalid, say that this particular sale does not fall within what people ordinarily understand by the unqualified term ‘sale,’ just as a sale for a deferred price, an unlawful price, and the like do not fall within it.

As for his assertion that a universal meaning was not the object of the command, and that particular instances sharing a universal meaning means nothing beyond the correspondence between the definition of the universal and the definitions of its particular instances, this denial goes too far. For particular instances correspond to one another in definition, yet none is a general meaning shared by all the others.

His statement, “Bringing a universal meaning into concrete existence is itself inconceivable,”