all the more evident with respect to the knowledge of the Lord of all worlds—glorified and exalted is He—and then that of His angels and prophets, may Allah’s blessings be upon them all.
Section
Furthermore, they divide arguments into syllogism, induction, and analogy. They explain that inference proceeds either from the universal to the particular, from the particular to the universal, or from one particular to another. Sometimes they express this in terms of the specific and the general, saying that one infers the specific from the general, the general from the specific, or one specific case from another.
They call the first “qiyās,” meaning subsumptive syllogism, for they reserve the term qiyās for this form of reasoning. Many scholars of legal theory and dialectical theology, however, reserve the term qiyās for analogy. For most rational thinkers, the term encompasses both.
They say that inferring the universal from particulars is induction. If it is complete, it is complete induction and yields certainty; if it is incomplete, it does not yield certainty.
The former consists in examining all the particulars and judging the universal according to what is found in its particulars. The latter consists in examining most of them. An example is someone saying: “An animal moves its lower jaw when it eats, for we have surveyed animals and found this to be so.” One replies to him: “The crocodile moves its upper jaw.”