It is also indispensable to acknowledge gradation in rank, the very purport of analogical (mushakkik) terms which stand opposite to the strictly univocal ones; that is exactly what the Qur’anic demonstrative arguments convey, for they are in essence an a fortiori inference (qiyās al-awlā).

Equally indispensable is the affirmation of the Lord’s unique attribute whereby He is set apart from everything besides Him. This is what His signs, exalted is He, point to—signs whose very existence entails the existence of His own Self. No syllogism, whether demonstrative or otherwise, can establish this.

Hence it is evident that their demonstrative syllogism fails to secure the goal by which the soul attains perfection in knowing created beings and in knowing their Creator—let alone to claim that none of these truths can be known except through it.

The subject is vast, yet our purpose here is only to expose the falsity of their negative claim, namely that theoretical sciences are acquired solely by means of their syllogistic method.

The monstrosity of their further claim that even God’s knowledge is produced by syllogism:

Not content with that sweeping negation—by which they fenced in what is broad and confined knowledge to a narrow path that yields but a trivial gain—they further alleged, as Ibn Sīnā and his followers state, that God’s own knowledge, and the knowledge of His Prophets and His friends, is obtained only through a syllogism containing a middle term.

In asserting this they are, to be sure, better than their predecessors who denied God’s knowledge altogether, and denied the knowledge of His Prophets—people who were among the most ignorant of all concerning the Lord of all beings, His Prophets, and His Books.

Yet when Ibn Sīnā, endowed with greater intellect and learning, adopted their logical procedure to articulate that view, those who followed this path—though more learned than their forerunners and more refined in understanding—proved more misguided than Jews and Christians and even more ignorant. For the latter possessed a measure of faith in the Necessary Existent and His attributes that these errant thinkers never attained, owing to the pride and illusion lodged in their breasts. They are of the party of Pharaoh and his ilk; hence you invariably find them belittling or opposing Moses and those with him among the followers of revealed religions and sacred laws.