whom they do not see. Most of them do not witness the details of his circumstances on which their interests depend; rather, they learn of them through reports passed among them. For this reason, Islamic law accepts testimony based on widespread report in such matters as death and lineage, by agreement of the jurists, although they differ over the other matters in which such testimony is admissible.

In general, accepting widespread and mass-transmitted reports, and the like, concerning things of a kind perceptible to the senses is an innate necessity for human beings, just as eating, drinking, and sexual intercourse are. To claim that any nation has lived without such knowledge and reports is like claiming that it has lived without these objects of sensory perception and these activities.

The confusion, however, arose from conflating the general category with the particular individual. Their statement that whatever cannot be known through the senses as a class is not acknowledged was confused with the claim that whatever is not known by this particular class is not acknowledged. There is an immense difference between the two statements: the latter represents an extreme degree of denial and rejection of the truth. This is why people universally denounced this statement so strongly, and why these speculative theologians classified it as a form of sophistry.