Likewise were all the leading imams of the Muslims, their scholars and dialecticians, and the adherents of every other religious community.

So, too, among the specialists in grammar, medicine, and geometry, none ventured into this field save those who followed the logicians. They merely imitated them in fashioning compound definitions out of genus and differentia, yet whatever knowledge they acquired from them was either knowledge that can dispense with the logicians’ falsehoods, or information that harms and does not benefit because of the ignorance or prolixity it contains.

For this reason—since inference may at times rest on a single premise, at other times on two, and at still other times on several—Muslim dialecticians have always cited only the evidences they needed for their premises. They never made it a rule, as the logicians do, to state exactly two premises in every argument. Their books, their sermons, their personal deliberations, and their public debates—whether for teaching, guidance, or disputation—proceed in the manner I have described, and the same is true of all other rational people, whether of this religion or another, except those who tread the path of the logicians.

Muslim dialecticians have continually faulted the logicians’ method, exposing the clumsiness of its expression, its halting diction, the inadequacy of its thought, and its failure of speech. They have shown that it is closer to corrupting rational and linguistic discourse than to rectifying it, and they refuse to employ it in their own reasoning and debates, whether with friends or foes.

Imam al-Ghazali and the science of logic:

Its widespread use truly began only in the time of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, for he placed an introductory treatise on logic at the head of his work al-Mustasfa and claimed that one should not rely on anyone’s knowledge unless he is versed in that logic.