of the truthful Prophet that Musaylimah is a liar. One who met him personally and witnessed his lies may know it directly; one who was absent may know it through recurrent mass transmission; and another may ascertain it by rational inference, for Musaylimah claimed prophethood while producing what flatly contradicts genuine Prophethood, so reason judges him false.

Likewise, the appearance of the new moon may be known by seeing it with one’s own eyes—in that case the judgment rests on sense-perception. Someone who did not witness the crescent may learn of it through recurrent reports, so for him the proposition is based on tawātur. Still another may know it by calculation, realizing through reckoning and inference that the night in question is the thirty-first of the month. Many such examples exist: a single fact may be grasped by one person through the senses, by another through transmitted report, and by a third through deliberative reasoning. These are the pathways by which the children of Adam acquire knowledge.

So it is with universal propositions: among them are those that are grasped without any syllogism or proof. This is not due to anything intrinsic in the propositions themselves; it is contingent on people’s differing states. Hence it is false to say of something Zayd learned by syllogism that no one else could learn it without a syllogism—such a denial is simply untrue.

Seventh Consideration
Decisive proofs for the equivalence of the universal (categorical) and the analogical forms of qiyās.

They claim that only the universal syllogism produces certainty, whereas the analogical syllogism—so they allege—does not. Yet we know that some analogies do yield certainty and others do not, just as universal syllogisms sometimes give certainty and sometimes merely probability. The similarity between two things may be established with certainty or only conjecturally, just like the generality of a universal proposition. When the two cases are linked by a common cause, that cause plays the role of the encompassing universal in the categorical syllogism.

This can be clarified by noting that, in reality, the universal syllogism ultimately reduces to the analogical syllogism, just as the latter, in truth, resolves into the former. For this reason scholars have differed over what the term qiyās denotes. Some restrict it to analogical reasoning alone—a view held by most jurists in the field of uṣūl. Others limit it to the universal syllogism only, which is the position of the majority of logicians. A third group, comprising most jurists and theologians, applies the term to both, for the universal syllogism rests on the sharing of particulars in a general ruling that encompasses them, whereas the analogical syllogism rests on two cases sharing a ruling that applies to each of them.