and who, in understanding this discourse, has not followed the natural instincts of an Arabic speaker and a sound, uncorrupted disposition. He has risen above the level of ordinary people, no longer sharing their understanding of customary speech, yet fallen below the heights of the learned. Thus he has not learned to distinguish between deceptively similar expressions, so that innate dispositions may remain as they were fashioned by Him Who perfected everything He created; and folly has led him to escape from the refuse heap of Batrā.

Whoever masters the sciences and comprehends their furthest reaches is thereby brought back to affirming innate dispositions in their original state. The messengers were sent only to perfect the innate disposition, not to change it:

“The natural disposition Allah has instilled in mankind. There is no altering Allah’s creation.”

It is well known that all Arabic speakers who hear this statement, learned and ordinary alike, understand it only as assigning the share to those of the deceased’s generation on condition that he leaves no child. They recognize that this is a single, connected statement whose parts belong together. The mistaken interpreter’s error arose only because he imagined that the first clause was general in scope, while the second singled out one of the two categories for mention, thus making this a case of “conflict between general wording and implication.”

He may also have read the works of certain speculative theologians or jurists who do not accept arguments from implication, or who, if they accept them, consider the indication of general wording stronger. This is because opposition to the former is weaker than opposition to the latter: only an insignificant handful, whose views carry no weight, have disputed the validity of general wording, whereas the validity of implication has been disputed by a group of jurists