the likeness of corresponding attributes and quantities is part of the balance. The same applies to that by which one recognizes differences between dissimilar things. Thus, when we know that Allah Most High prohibited wine for the reasons He mentioned—that it turns people away from remembering Allah and from prayer, and breeds enmity and hatred among believers—and then see that nabīdh (a drink made from steeped fruit) resembles it in these respects, the shared feature constituting the underlying reason for the ruling is the balance Allah has sent down into our hearts. By it we weigh the one and treat it like the other, making no distinction between two like things. Sound analogy is therefore part of the justice Allah has commanded.
Whoever knows universals without knowing the particular possesses only the balance. Yet their purpose is to weigh things that exist outside the mind. Without their particular instances, universals would have no significance, just as there would be no need for a balance without things to weigh. Undoubtedly, when one of the two things being weighed is present and is compared with the other using the balance, the weighing is more complete than when the balance—the shared universal attribute—is in the mind, and whatever individual entity is present is weighed by it while the other is absent.
No rational person should suppose that the intellectual balance Allah sent down is Greek logic, for several reasons.
The first:
Allah sent down the balances with His scriptures in the days of Noah, Abraham, Moses, and others, before He created the Greeks. Aristotle devised this Greek logic three hundred years before Christ. How, then, could earlier nations have weighed things by it?!