—the truth, for he is divinely protected in what he relates from God, and thus not the slightest error can ever find a place in his report about Him.

Accordingly, this proof entails the reality it establishes with a necessary, inseparable entailment. Whether the concomitant by which one argues is the presence or the absence of something, the evidence itself may be a presence or an absence, and by either one may infer presence or absence. One infers from the existence of a thing the non-existence of its contradictory and its opposite, and from the non-existence of its contradictory one infers its existence. Likewise, from the existence of the necessitant one infers the existence of the consequent, and from the absence of the consequent one infers the absence of the necessitant. In truth, every proof that is employed is a concomitant of that which it proves, and this embraces everything they have mentioned and all that they have left unmentioned.

What they call a “connected conditional proposition” is nothing more than reasoning from the existence of the necessitant to the existence of the consequent and from the absence of the consequent to the absence of the necessitant, whether the idea is expressed in conditional form or categorical form. Differences in wording while the meaning is one and the same do not alter the reality of the matter; our concern is with meanings, not with mere words.

Thus, when someone says, “If the prayer is valid, then the worshipper is in a state of purification; if the sun has risen, day is present; if the agent is knowing and able, he is alive,” and the like, he is conveying the same meaning as:

“The validity of prayer necessitates valid purification,”
“From the validity of prayer it necessarily follows that purification is duly established,”
“No one is praying except in a state of purity,”
“Purification is a condition for the validity of prayer; when the condition is absent, the conditioned act is absent,”
“Every worshipper is purified; therefore, whoever is not purified is not a worshipper,”

and similar ways of combining words and meanings that convey this inference without restricting people to a single form of wording.

Digression:

When minds and their conceptions expand, their expressions expand as well; but when minds and conceptions contract, their possessor remains as though imprisoned in both intellect and tongue. This is what befalls the devotees of Greek logic: you will find them among the narrowest of people in knowledge and exposition, and the weakest in comprehension and articulation.