The prohibition of this nabīdh is subsumed under the prohibition of every intoxicant. Hence some have said that the argument proceeds from the universal to the particular. The more precise analysis, however, is that whatever is affirmed of a universal is necessarily affirmed of each of its particulars. The ruling of prohibition is broader than “wine”; it is affirmed of wine, and therefore affirmed of every single instance of wine. What has actually taken place, then, is the use of one universal to establish another universal for the particulars included under the first. In relation to that second universal—the ruling—the evidentiary term functions like a particular, yet, in relation to the particulars that are the subjects of the ruling, it remains a universal.
On this point there is no dispute: the evidence is the middle term. It is either broader than, or at least equal to, the minor term, while the major term is either broader than, or equal to, the middle term. The major term represents the ruling, the predicate, the piece of information; it is the predicate in the conclusion. The minor term is the entity about which the ruling is asserted—the described subject—and it serves as the subject in the conclusion.
Representative analogy (qiyās al-tamthīl) rests on two particulars sharing the cause (ʿillah) of the ruling.
As for the claim that representative analogy is “reasoning from a particular to a particular,” if this is stated without qualification so as to imply that the bare particular is used as evidence for another particular, it is incorrect. Representative analogy operates only by means of a middle term: their common participation in the cause of the ruling, or in the evidential basis of the ruling together with that cause. It is, therefore, either a causal analogy or an evidential analogy.
The soundness of an analogy cannot be ascertained in the case of analogy by resemblance (qiyās al-shabah).
When such an analogy is proposed, it must fall into one of two cases. Either the common factor between the original case (aṣl) and the subsidiary case (farʿ) is itself the cause, or it is something that entails the cause—and whatever entails the cause counts as evidence for it. If, however, the common factor is neither the cause nor something that entails the cause, then sharing in that factor does not necessitate sharing in the ruling. The cause may accompany that factor, or it may not. In that situation one cannot know that the cause operative in the original case is present in the subsidiary case; consequently, the validity of the analogy remains unverified. Indeed, the analogy is only sound if both cases share the cause, and we cannot know that they share it unless we know that they share either the cause itself or something that necessitates it, for the existence of the necessitating factor entails the existence of what it necessitates. If, then, we suppose that the two cases do not