actions corresponding to them. A corrupt belief therefore produces corrupt action, and the corruption of the action—the offshoot—indicates the corruption of its foundation, namely, the belief. The same applies to prohibited actions that produce harmful consequences, such as drinking wine, which turns people away from remembering Allah Most High and from prayer, and engenders enmity and hatred. These harmful consequences arising from the action are an offshoot that necessarily follows from its foundation; their corruption thus indicates the corruption of that foundation. The same holds for every foundation that causes its offshoot and necessarily gives rise to it.

As for the second kind, its foundation serves as a condition rather than a cause. Examples include life, which makes movement and perception possible, and the foundations of jurisprudence, which consist in knowledge of the categories of legal evidence, the manner of drawing inferences, and the like. These foundations do not entail the existence of their offshoots. If an offshoot is unsound, this does not entail that its foundation is unsound, since its unsoundness may arise from something other than that foundation.

This is analogous to living creatures begetting one another: the parents are the foundation from which the child comes. Yet Allah, Most High and Most Holy, brings forth the living from the dead and the dead from the living. Thus a disbeliever begets