everything found in the syllogistic form—and more besides. This has been treated at length elsewhere.
At times one needs no further proof composed of two premises—no syllogism or anything of the sort; a single premise will suffice. Indeed, even that premise may be dispensed with if the notion is already fully grasped from the outset. Take the case of someone who knows that wine is forbidden and who simultaneously understands that “wine” refers to whatever intoxicates. His knowledge then covers every individual instance of wine equally: he can say, “This intoxicant is wine, therefore it is forbidden,” and the same for any other intoxicant.
Another person may know that wine is forbidden yet be unaware that every intoxicant falls under the name “wine,” supposing the term applies only to certain kinds. When he learns—through a Scriptural text, through the usage of the Companions among whom the Qur’an was revealed, through the historical fact that at the time of the prohibition they possessed no grape-juice and called the intoxicating date-nabīdh ‘wine,’ or through any similar evidence—that every intoxicant is wine, then this single premise gives him the ruling he seeks.
It is therefore plain that the claim that every desired conclusion must rest upon a syllogism, that the syllogism must be the universal logical variety, and that it must contain two premises, is incorrect. This, in turn, refutes their contention—mentioned earlier—that no propositional knowledge can be attained except through the logical syllogism.
Our present purpose, however, is to show how little benefit—if any—such syllogisms provide. When the inquirer already possesses a general proposition conveyed by the Messenger that “every intoxicant is unlawful,” his aim is met; the universal statements received from the prophets yield certain knowledge in theological matters.
As for the universal propositions derived from the philosophers’ sciences, they are either defective, or at best on the level of analogical qiyās, or else they impart no knowledge about particular existents but only about mental abstractions, such as arithmetic and geometry. Even in the latter case, although the proposition may apply to whatever conforms to the given measure, knowing that any concrete instance matches that measure comes not from syllogism but from sense-perception; the syllogism, then, does not supply the conclusion. Alternatively, the propositions in question may be of a kind in which the philosophers hold no monopoly, for all nations share them without ever invoking their formal logic—where analogical qiyās and syllogistic qiyās stand on the same footing.