external reality, so too no unrestricted expression is found in actual usage entirely detached from everything that makes it determinate. Speech conveys meaning only when its elements are joined into a construction, and this entails qualification and specification, as when you say, “Honor the human being,” or “The human being is better than the horse.” The same applies to His saying:

“Establish prayer,”

and similar expressions. Here many people have erred concerning universal meanings, imagining that they exist in external reality stripped of all qualifications, and concerning univocal terms, imagining that they are used without qualifications.

The precise position is that an unrestricted universal meaning exists in external reality only in a determinate, qualified form, and the expression denoting it occurs in usage only with qualification and specification. If the meaning is conceived in abstraction, its locus is the mind. An abstract expression is then conceived for it, although that expression does not occur in actual usage in such an abstract form.

The “point here” is that the term “prayer” has a general, unrestricted meaning, but is used only in conjunction with a qualification specific to some of its instances—as in our prayer, the prayer of the angels, and prayer as attributed to Allah, glorified and exalted is He. People err in such matters when they suppose that the prayer of one kind of being is like that of another, despite knowing that the one is not like the other. If one is not like the other, its prayer need not be like the other’s, even if the two share an element of resemblance. We have established this in detail in our refutation of the Ittihādiyya, the Jahmiyya, the philosophizers, and others like them.