his mind, on hearing an expression, a meaning that does not occur to the Nabataean who has come to use words in senses other than their proper meanings. This is where many people have gone wrong. They have become accustomed, through the speech of either their common people or their scholars, to using an expression in a particular sense. When they hear it in the Quran and hadith, they assume that it is being used in that sense. Thus, they interpret the words of Allah and His Messenger according to their own Nabataean speech and newly developed conventions. This is one way in which various groups have fallen into error. Rather, one must know the language, conventions, and customary usage in which the Quran and Sunnah were revealed, and what the Companions understood from the Messenger when they heard those expressions. For Allah and His Messenger addressed them according to that language, those conventions, and that customary usage—not according to what arose afterward.

Moreover, we have explained elsewhere that Allah and His Messenger left nothing in the Quran and hadith without explaining its meaning to those addressed, leaving them no need for anything else. We have discussed this at length elsewhere.

It has therefore become clear that the expression these people posit as free of all qualifications exists only as a mental supposition, not in actual speech. Likewise, the meaning that the logicians posit as free of all qualifications exists only as a mental supposition: nothing exists in external reality that is free of every qualification.

Thus, what they posit in dividing knowledge into conception and assent, and defining conception as the conception of a bare meaning devoid of every qualification, does not exist. Likewise, the simple elements from which they claim species are composed, and which they regard as free of every qualification, do not exist. Nor does what they posit when they claim that the Necessary Existent is existence devoid of every positive determination.