Suppose you take a fixed quantity of either of the two precious metals and then use it to weigh its counterpart. The first amount now stands as a witness, and onlookers attest that this was weighed against that. If the second sample proves equal, greater, or lesser, that method is preferable to weighing one of the two while the other is absent, for people might suspect that the weigher has not dealt justly—something far less likely when both are placed on the scale together. Indeed, the matter is resolved by weighing one directly against the other without any standard weight; and so it is with matters weighed by the intellect.

We have discussed this issue at length elsewhere, demonstrating that sound analogy (qiyās) is part of the justice God has revealed and that the Book and the Balance can never diverge. An authenticated text from the Messengers can never conflict with a sound analogy, whether juridical or rational. Sound textual proofs cannot contradict sound rational proofs, and a legal analogy that satisfies the conditions of validity can never clash with any scriptural passage. Nothing in the Sacred Law is contrary to correct analogy; any appearance of conflict arises only with faulty analogy. We have treated this in a separate monograph and in our work Repelling the Conflict between Reason and Revelation.

Whenever someone imagines a clash between the Book and the Balance, between the text and the legal or rational analogy, one of two conclusions necessarily follows: either the textual evidence he invokes is defective—because it is not authentically traced to the Infallible Messenger or does not entail what he claims—or the analogy he employs, juridical or rational, is defective, for one or more of its premises are unsound, owing to the ambiguous and equivocal terms that often plague analogical arguments.

Abū Ḥāmid, in al-Qisṭās al-Mustaqīm, listed five “balances” that are none other than Greek logic itself, merely expressed in different words. No intelligent person should imagine that the intellectual Balance God revealed is identical with Greek logic, for several reasons:

First, God sent down the balances together with His scriptures before the Greeks even existed—since the times of Noah, Abraham, Moses, and the rest—whereas Greek logic was formulated by Aristotle three centuries before Jesus. How, then, could the earlier nations have weighed by means of it?

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