As for al-Khattābī’s discussion of analogy and inference in legal rulings, and his assertion that the Quran and Sunnah do not explicitly address everything people need, this concerns analogical reasoning in religious law, which is discussed at length elsewhere.

People oscillate between excess and neglect in this matter, just as they do with rational analogy concerning matters of fact. One group claims that most cases are not covered by the revealed texts and that their rulings can only be known through analogy. Another group, relying on their own opinions, claims that all analogy is invalid. They even reject the inference known as refining the operative cause, a fortiori analogy, the evident implications of a text, and reasoning from an explicitly stated effective cause. Instead, they resort to general wording and the presumption that an existing state continues.

Both groups are mistaken and in error. The first has failed to give the Quran and Sunnah their due and has fallen short in knowing and understanding them. They have relied on various analogies based merely on concomitance, which are of [no] avail, or on blindly following a statement without knowing its proponent’s evidence.

Very often, when you examine their evidence, you find that it amounts to nothing more than an unsupported claim: someone supposes that the ruling established in the original case depends upon the characteristic shared by both cases, without any evidence indicating this, but merely because of a resemblance that has occurred to him,