enables the meaning to be understood, it would not be understood, nor could anyone understand what He has conveyed about unseen matters.

If this holds for the information conveyed through transmitted texts, it likewise holds for rational inferential inquiry. We know what is absent from us only by comparing it with what we have witnessed; thus, the unseen is considered in light of the observed. Through observing existing individual entities and particulars, universal rational propositions form in our minds. Subsuming particular instances under these propositions constitutes syllogistic inference, as in what logicians call the two premises and the conclusion. Considering a particular in light of the shared meaning constitutes analogical inference based on a common ground, whether that ground is the evidence for the judgment or the cause underlying that evidence.

People hold different positions on this matter:

Some claim that demonstrative inference is syllogistic inference, and that analogical inference does not yield certainty and is called inference only figuratively. This is the position of certain logicians and those who agree with them in rejecting analogical inference in both rational and religious matters, such as Ibn Hazm and others like him. Others reject analogical inference in rational matters but not in religious matters, such as Abū al-Ma‘ālī and his followers, including al-Ghazālī, al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, Abū Muhammad al-Maqdisī, and others like them.

Others take the opposite position, accepting analogical inference in rational matters but not in religious matters. This is the position of the leading scholars of the literalist school, such as Dāwūd ibn ‘Alī and others like him,