three: kinship, marriage, and patronage.”

According to Abū Hanīfa, and according to one of the two reports from Ahmad, entitlement to inheritance is also established through a pact of mutual allegiance and other means. Here, the ruling may fail to follow from the effective cause because of an impediment, such as slavery, killing, or difference of religion. When “effective cause” is intended in this sense, it may admit exceptions owing to missing conditions and the presence of impediments.

However, if the person advancing the causal explanation does not identify a relevant distinction between the counterexample and the other cases, his explanation is invalid. For the ruling sometimes accompanies the attribute, as in the original case; sometimes fails to accompany it, as in the original case; and sometimes differs from it, as in the counterexample. Unless the person presenting the argument demonstrates that the new case resembles the original case rather than the counterexample, there is no stronger justification for assimilating it to the original case and affirming the ruling than for assimilating it to the counterexample and denying the ruling. The attribute exists in all three cases: the ruling accompanies it in one but not the other, while its application to the third remains uncertain.

This is like three people participating in a killing. The victim’s relatives execute one but spare another, either because he pays blood money or because he had previously done them a kindness. As for the third, it is not known whether his situation resembles that of the one executed or the one pardoned. We cannot place him in either category without evidence showing that he resembles one rather than the other.

Once this is understood, legal theorists and jurists disagree over the permissibility of consuming carrion