based on the weaker. Likewise, a thing should not be defined by something less evident than itself, even if the definition corresponds to what it defines, includes all and only its instances, and serves to distinguish it from other things. Nevertheless, defining or arguing by means of something less evident may be useful in other respects. For example, someone may have developed a doubt or stubbornly resisted an evident matter, which can then be explained to him through something else that is more evident to him. Evidentness and obscurity are relative: someone who habitually dismisses clear and evident matters may regard lengthy, abstruse discourse with awe and esteem, as is found among people of this kind. There are other benefits as well. Yet knowledge and explanation do not invariably depend on this, and that is the point here. These people often err by supposing that what they seek to establish cannot be known except through the definitions and proofs they have presented. This error leads some astray, until they imagine that, if that particular method is invalidated, the door to knowledge is closed.

Thus, when al-Āmidī and others based their argument on this method, which ultimately rests on the argument from contingency, and based the argument from contingency on the denial of an infinite regress, the consequences were what they were. Such people are like someone who turned against the Muslims’ commanders and brave soldiers, who repel and fight the enemy, then cut them off and withheld the provision by which