—whether the term is combined by way of restrictive composition or left uncombined.

For this reason, when an Arab once passed by a mu’adhdhin who was proclaiming, while putting the name in the accusative, “I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah,” he retorted, “Muhammad—did what?” Because the sentence, as uttered, lacked its verb and thus conveyed nothing definite.

Similarly, when someone asks, “What is this?” and the reply is simply, “Food,” that single word is—by unanimous agreement—the predicate of an omitted subject; the full sense is, “This is food.” The Qur’an adopts the same ellipsis: “If you were to ask them, ‘Who created the heavens and the earth?’ they would surely say, ‘Allah’” (Q 31:25); and likewise, “Say: ‘Who sent down the Book that Moses brought as a light and guidance for mankind?’ … Say: ‘Allah’” (Q 6:91). Another instance is, “They will say: ‘Three—their dog is the fourth of them’; and they will say: ‘Five—their dog is the sixth of them’; and they will say: ‘Seven—and their dog is the eighth’” (Q 18:22), meaning: “They are three,” “They are five,” and “They are seven.”

A further example is His word, “And say: The truth is from your Lord” (Q 18:29), meaning, “This is the truth from your Lord.” It is not, as some uninformed people imagine, an imperative meaning “Speak the truth,” for had that been intended the word “truth” would have appeared in the accusative. The verse’s purpose is to affirm that the Qur’an is true; hence He says, “The truth is from your Lord.” The general command to speak truth is found elsewhere, such as in, “And when you speak, be just” (Q 6:152), and, “Has not the covenant of the Book been taken from them that they should say nothing concerning Allah but the truth?” (Q 7:169).

Now, even if we concede that a definition could consist of a single word, single words are nothing but names. All the questioner can achieve is a conception of what the name denotes. Yet once he has formed that conception, how can he know that this denoted object is precisely what he was asking about, and that it represents the very reality of the thing being defined?

If it is said, “He gains, merely by conceiving the denoted object—without judging whether it is this or that—nothing more than the concept ‘human,’” we answer: in that case the matter is no more than the solitary word’s indication of its meaning, the relation of a name to what it names, exactly as when one simply says “human being.” This, therefore, corroborates what we have already stated—that