—many in number—and involves unsound notions and numerous false claims that cannot be exhaustively examined here.
Indeed, experience, past and present, shows that anyone who binds himself to using logic in his inquiries and debates is unsound in both inquiry and debate, and frequently unable to substantiate and explain his knowledge.
The most charitable interpretation of such a claim is to suppose that its proponent and others like him had been utterly ignorant and astray, having lost all means of guidance, and found nothing to turn them away from those errors except some of the sound elements contained in logic. Some of these elements have indeed led many such people to abandon some of their false beliefs, even if they gained no beneficial truth and fell into other falsehoods. Even so, the obligation to study logic cannot in any way be ascribed to Islamic law. Anyone in this condition has only himself to blame: he abandoned the truth Allah commanded until he came to need falsehood.
It is well known that declaring logic obligatory is the position of its extremists and ignorant adherents. Even its accomplished practitioners do not adhere to its rules in all their fields of knowledge. Rather, they disregard them, whether because of their length, their lack of benefit, their unsoundness, or their lack of clear distinctions and the vagueness and ambiguity they contain. For many passages in it are meat from a scrawny camel atop a rugged mountain: neither is the mountain easy enough to climb, nor the meat fat enough to be worth carrying away.