For this reason, these pseudo-philosophers have found acceptance only among people most remote from both reason and religion—among the Qarmatians and other Bāṭinīs who cobbled their creed together from Greek philosophy and the Magian religion while outwardly professing Rāfiḍī Shiʿism, and among the uninformed followers of certain Sufis and scholastic theologians. Their wares sell only under a polity steeped in pre-Islamic ignorance, devoid of knowledge and faith, whether its rulers are outright unbelievers or hypocrites. Some of them once gained currency with atheistic hypocrites, then again with the idolatrous Turks; and, in truth, they are always welcomed only by the enemies of God and His Messenger, whether disbelievers or hypocrites.

Further remarks on their restriction of proof to exactly two premises:

Our present discussion addresses the argument they advance—that every proof must consist of two premises, no more and no less—an argument whose weakness has already become clear.

Later, when they realized that a proof may sometimes require several premises and that at other times a single premise is sufficient, they claimed that one might insert an additional statement into the syllogism—namely, a third premise beyond the original two—either for a corrupt objective or for a legitimate one such as clarifying the first two premises. They call this form “the composite,” saying that it in fact comprises multiple syllogisms marshaled to establish one desired conclusion, even though the particular conclusion intended in itself