This, then, is the effective cause of the prohibition: either because the drink is itself an intoxicant—intoxication being the very cause of prohibition—or because it possesses intoxicating potency. When this link is demonstrated with proper evidence, the qiyās is sound. Thus, if one says, “Nabīdh is an intoxicant and every intoxicant is unlawful,” or, “Nabīdh has intoxicating potency and whatever has intoxicating potency is unlawful,” the inference is likewise correct.

Everything that can serve as evidence for the soundness of the major premise can equally serve to show that the shared attribute is the cause of the ruling in the principal case; and whatever can establish the minor premise can be used to confirm the presence of that attribute in the subsidiary case.

If that proof is definitive, it is definitive in both types of qiyās; if it is merely conjectural, it remains conjectural in both. The assertion made by certain logicians and their followers that certainty is achieved only through the syllogistic form (qiyās al-shumūl) and not through analogical reasoning (qiyās al-tamthīl) is profoundly unsound, reflecting a failure to grasp the true nature of the two forms, as has been explained elsewhere.

The desired ruling may also be known from a textual statement—such as the sound ḥadīth in the canonical collections—that “every intoxicant is forbidden.” In such a case the syllogistic form is unnecessary; indeed no form of qiyās at all is required, for the ruling is already known without analogy.

Moreover, whenever a ruling is known through the syllogistic form, it can likewise be known through analogical qiyās, as noted earlier, by treating the middle term—the element common to the principal and subsidiary cases—as the nexus. The evidence marshalled by the proponent of the syllogistic form to validate his universal major premise is precisely what the advocate of analogical qiyās employs to prove the causal efficacy of the shared attribute. That common factor—the shared attribute that functions as the middle term in the syllogistic form—entails the ruling and serves as its cause in the principal case, just as the syllogist holds that the major term follows necessarily from the middle term.

Thus the major term in the syllogistic form corresponds to the ruling in analogical qiyās, the middle term is the shared nexus (the manāṭ), and the minor term is the subsidiary case. Analogical qiyās distinguishes itself by explicitly citing a principal case that parallels the subsidiary case (the minor term), whereas the syllogistic form does not. Accordingly, in analogical qiyās there are