and they were firmly certain of Our signs.”

The point, then, is that their later adherents—who consider themselves more learned than those before them—maintain that knowledge of the Lord is obtained only through demonstrative syllogism, and that the Prophets likewise gained their knowledge by this means. We have rebutted this claim in detail elsewhere.

Our concern here is merely to draw attention to the unsoundness of their assertion that knowledge can be acquired only through the proof they describe. If such a negation is false when applied to ordinary human beings, it is even more patently false with regard to the knowledge of the Lord of all worlds, glorified and exalted is He, and then with regard to His angels and His prophets—may God’s blessings be upon them all.

Section
The Logicians’ views on evidence and syllogism

They divide the genus of evidence into three types: syllogism (qiyās), induction (istiqrāʾ), and analogy (tamthīl). Their reasoning is that inference is made either (1) from the universal to the particular, (2) from the particular to the universal, or (3) from one particular to another. They sometimes phrase this in terms of the general and the specific, saying that one may infer from the general to the specific, from the specific to the general, or from one of two specifics to the other.

They designate the first mode as “syllogism,” meaning by it the inclusive or comprehensive syllogism, and they restrict the word qiyās to this type alone. Many scholars of jurisprudence and kalām, however, restrict the term qiyās to what the logicians call “analogy.” The majority of rational thinkers, for their part, apply the word qiyās to both.

Inference from particulars to a universal, they say, is induction. If the induction is complete, it is “perfect induction” and yields certainty; if incomplete, it does not. Perfect induction canvasses every single particular and then judges the universal by what is found in all of them, whereas incomplete induction surveys most of the particulars and may prove false—such as the claim, “Whenever an animal eats, it moves its lower jaw.”