just as it has barred many of them from the path to knowledge and cast them into valleys of error and ignorance. What, then, of sciences beyond their own, whose scope is boundless for earlier and later generations?

Moreover, you will not find anyone on earth who has mastered a science and become a leading authority in it by relying on the discipline of logic, whether in the religious sciences or any other field. Physicians, arithmeticians, scribes, and others achieve mastery in their sciences and crafts without the discipline of logic. Within Islam, works have been written on grammar, lexicography, prosody, jurisprudence and its principles, speculative theology, and other subjects. None of the leading authorities in these fields paid any heed to logic; indeed, most of them lived before this Greek logic was translated into Arabic.

As for the sciences inherited purely from the prophets—although jurisprudence and its principles are connected with them—they are far too exalted and sublime for one to suppose that their scholars paid any heed to logic. For among the first three generations of this community—which is the best community brought forth for humanity, and whose finest generations are those first three—none paid heed to logic or concerned themselves with it. Yet their mastery and perfection of the sciences reached a height no one else can attain. They possessed the deepest knowledge, were the least given to affectation, and had the most righteous hearts.

Whenever others discuss the subjects they discussed, you will find a disparity between the two greater than the distance between the foot and the crown of the head. Indeed, what we have established through induction is this known fact: among those who engage in the sciences, those who practise this