No one can ever demonstrate, in concrete reality, an efficient cause for a produced effect that is temporally simultaneous with it. At most, simultaneity can hold between a condition and what is conditioned by it. The term “cause,” however, is ambiguous: it may mean the agent, or the recipient, or the set of conditions.

This very ambiguity has led to confusion concerning the attributes of the Necessary Existent. They say, “Were He to possess attributes, those attributes would be effects of the Essence, and what is necessary can never be an effect.” We reply: the expression “Necessary Existent” may be intended to mean “that which needs no agent”; in that sense the attributes are necessary. It may also be intended to mean “that which requires no substratum”; in that sense only the Essence is necessary, whereas the attributes are not. The proof that has been established is merely that contingents must have an agent independent of all else; it never proved that His attributes, like His Essence, require no locus. These matters are treated at length elsewhere.

Discussion of analogy and proof in general:

Our purpose here is to speak in general about analogy and evidence. We have expanded on this in another place when we examined their claim that reasoning is sometimes from the general to the particular (which they call “qiyās”), sometimes from the particular to the general (“istiqrāʾ,” induction), and sometimes from one particular to another (“tamthīl,” comparison). We have shown the unsoundness of limiting and classifying inference in this way, and the invalidity of their rulings on these categories, for among the forms of reasoning is that in which one infers from a specific to a specific, or from an equal to its equal, whether the terms be particular or universal.

It is not essential for the evidence to be broader or narrower than the ruling it supports; what matters is that the evidence entail the ruling. The entailment may be narrower than the entailed matter or equal to it, but it may not be broader. It can, however, be broader than the subject of the ruling—the entity about which the conclusion is asserted.

Thus, if the desired conclusion is that the intoxicating nabīdh under dispute is unlawful, one argues that the intoxicating nabīdh is wine on the basis of the textual proof: the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—said, “Every intoxicant is wine,” related by Muslim and others. In this instance, the term “wine” is broader than the particular nabīdh in question.