Inheritance is established through kinship, marriage, and alliance (walā’), just as ownership is established through exchange, inheritance, gift, and the seizure of spoils. Were the advocate of analogy to insist that retaliation (qiṣāṣ) is obligatory in all such cases by analogy with homicide, this objection would not arise, because the penalty for apostasy or adultery is not qiṣāṣ.

As for “lack of effect,” it nullifies whatever is alleged to be the legal cause, for the mere presence of an evidentiary link does not of itself prove causality; a proof is not required to work in both directions. Thus, if someone who practices analogy were to say about the zakāt of a minor, “His garment is clothing, so no zakāt is due on it, just as no zakāt is due on the clothing of an adult,” he is answered: “Being clothing has no bearing, either in the original case or the subsidiary one; rather, the jurists hold that no zakāt is due on any of a minor’s property.” These are concise remarks concerning those universal principles in which people often fall into confusion.

Opposing one definition with another needs no elaboration.

Accordingly, when the hearer invalidates a definition sometimes by alleging deficiency and at other times by counter-definition—and both moves are impossible unless he already conceives the reality being defined—it becomes clear that the reality can be conceived without the definition, and that is precisely what was to be shown.

Eleventh: They themselves admit that some concepts are self-evident and need no definition; otherwise circularity or infinite regress would ensue.

It must therefore be said that whether knowledge is self-evident or inferential is a relative matter, just like a proposition’s being certain or merely probable. Zayd may be sure of what ʿAmr only conjectures, a meaning may be obvious to Zayd while others can reach it only through deliberation, and what is sensory knowledge to Zayd may, for ʿAmr, be known only by report. Many people imagine that the necessary, acquired, self-evident, or inferential character of a given piece of knowledge is inherent in it such that all people share the same judgment; this is a serious mistake and at odds with reality.

For anything a person witnesses in his own place and time counts, for him, as sensory knowledge.