and the absence of an impediment. Thus, everything on which the ruling depends falls within it.

“Cause” may also mean something that calls for a ruling: it contains a feature that warrants and calls for the ruling, without necessarily making it inevitable. The ruling associated with such a cause may depend on certain conditions being fulfilled and certain impediments being absent. If it admits an exception, and the ruling fails to follow because a condition is missing or an impediment is present, this does not undermine its validity. On this understanding, the deficiency is remedied by identifying the relevant distinction. But if the ruling fails to follow without any condition being missing or any impediment being present, this shows that it is not a cause. For, on this supposition, it is a complete cause, if it is deemed to be present in its entirety, with its conditions fulfilled and its impediments absent. A ruling cannot fail to follow from a complete cause; its failure to follow therefore shows that the cause is not complete.

The point of this comparison is that the objection raised against a cause by citing a counterexample rests on the question of whether a cause admits exceptions—that is, whether the attribute can be present without the ruling. The objection that an attribute has no effect is the reverse: the ruling is present without the attribute. This conflicts with the requirement that the ruling be absent when the cause is absent, just as the first objection conflicts with the requirement that the ruling be present whenever the cause is present. The former requirement turns on the question of attributing a ruling to two causes.

Although most jurists, both of our school and others, do not require the absence of the cause to entail the absence of the ruling in matters of Islamic law, and allow a single ruling to be attributed to two causes, they nevertheless say that a cause is invalidated by its lack of effect. This is because the presence of the ruling without this attribute shows that the attribute is not a cause, provided that nothing takes the place of this