His Book, and whatever Allah has made obligatory is obligatory.” Such statements are regarded by reasonable people as clumsy, inarticulate speech, explanations of the obvious, and needless additions.
This pointless verbosity in their syllogisms resembles their verbosity in their definitions, as when they define the sun as “a celestial body that rises by day.” Such discourse serves only to waste time, weary minds, and multiply nonsense. Moreover, those who follow them in their definitions and demonstrations continually disagree over how to define things already known without their definitions, and dispute demonstrations of matters that have no need of their demonstrations.
Their claim, “The desired conclusion has no more than two parts and therefore requires no more than two premises,” may be answered as follows:
If you mean that it contains only two simple terms, that is not so. Rather, it may be expressed using several terms. Consider someone who is uncertain whether nabīdh is forbidden by a scriptural text or is not forbidden by either a text or analogy. If the respondent says, “Nabīdh is forbidden by a scriptural text,” the desired conclusion has three parts. Likewise, if someone asks, “Is consensus conclusive evidence?” and the respondent says, “Consensus is conclusive evidence,” the desired conclusion has three parts.
If someone asks, “Is a human being a body endowed with sensation, growth, voluntary movement, and reason, or not?” the desired conclusion here has six parts. In short, a subject and predicate—the grammatical subject and predicate—constitute a declarative sentence, which may consist of two expressions or of several expressions, if