knowledge. Thus they claim knowledge, yet they have asserted this universal negative proposition—which encompasses more cases than anyone but Allah can count—without any knowledge of it whatsoever.

This is further clarified by the fifth argument:

The aforementioned principles that they regard as yielding certainty—namely, internal and external sensory perceptions, self-evident truths, findings established through experience, and intuitive apprehensions—undoubtedly yield sensory certainty. But on what grounds do they claim that certainty cannot be attained through anything else?

They must provide evidence for this negation before their statement, “Certainty cannot be attained without them,” can be valid. This is correct, but it is not what their leading authorities say. Undoubtedly, anyone possessed of reason and faith must oppose them in their denial of truths attained outside this method. It was through this that those among them who succumbed to hypocrisy became hypocrites and heretics.

Thus, sensible people, whether adherents of religious communities or others, came to regard logic as liable to foster denial of the truth, obstinacy, heresy, and hypocrisy. Someone even related to us that a non-Arab man came to study logic under one of their teachers. After studying a portion of it, he asked, “Master, which chapter deals with abandoning prayer?” They laughed at him.