For this reason, Muslim scholars and the leading authorities in religion have continually condemned logic and its practitioners and warned against both. I have even seen a fatwa from later scholars bearing the signatures of several eminent figures of their time, including leading Shāfiʿī and Hanafī scholars and others, containing forceful statements prohibiting it and calling for the punishment of its practitioners. Among the well-known accounts that have reached us is the following:

Shaykh Abū ʿAmr ibn al-Salāh ordered that a well-known school be taken away from Abū al-Hasan al-Āmidī, saying, “Taking it from him is better than capturing Acre.” Yet no one in al-Āmidī’s time was more deeply versed than he in speculative theology and philosophy, and he was among the best of their practitioners in adherence to Islam and the soundest in creed.

It is well known that subtle matters—whether true or false, whether matters of faith or unbelief—can only be understood through intelligence and discernment. Likewise, the practitioners of logic may deem someone ignorant because he does not share their learning, even if his faith is better than theirs, when he falls short in intelligence and eloquence. They are as Allah Most High described:

“Indeed, those who committed crimes used to laugh at those who believed;
and when they passed by them, they would exchange derisive glances;
and when they returned to their own people, they would return jesting;
and when they saw the believers, they would say, ‘These people are truly astray.’
Yet they had not been sent as guardians over them.
So today those who believed are laughing at the disbelievers,
reclining on adorned couches, looking on.
Have the disbelievers been repaid for what they used to do?”

Thus, when they blindly accept from their false masters that whatever is not obtained through this syllogistic method is not knowledge, even though many of them may obtain nothing through this syllogistic method by which to acquire