a third perspective, disbelief corrupts the heart and spirit, which rules the body; murder destroys the body that bears it, putting an end to an existing life. Unlawful sexual intercourse, however, corrupts the manner of existence rather than existence itself. Yet this applies specifically to unlawful sexual intercourse; from this it becomes clear that sodomy involves greater corruption than unlawful sexual intercourse.

Section

The nations that are the finest of humankind—the Arabs, Romans, and Persians—are divided according to these three faculties. These are the nations among whom human virtues have become manifest, and they inhabit the central regions of the earth in both longitude and latitude. Other peoples, such as the black peoples, the Turks, and others like them, follow in their wake.

Among the Arabs, the intellectual faculty of reason and speech predominated, and their name was derived from this characteristic. They were called Arabs, from iʿrāb, meaning clarification and clear expression, which is the distinctive characteristic of the faculty of reason and speech.