or part of its sound—this is not something all human beings share in identically; rather every community hears things that no other community hears. Much the same applies to what is seen: there is no individual, no neighborhood, no town, and no region except that they witness sights unseen by others. As for smell, taste, and touch, there is no single concrete object in which all people participate; what these smell, taste, and touch is not the very same thing those smell, taste, and touch. At most the sharing is at the generic level, not in the specific instance, just as people agree in drinking water as a species and in physical contact with women as a species.
The same holds for what is known through tawātur, through experiment, or through intuitive insight: a report may reach tawātur for one group and be experimentally verified by them, yet neither reach tawātur for another group nor be tested by them. Still, both groups may concur with respect to the genus, as when one people test certain medicines and others test medicines of the same class; they agree in knowledge of the genus, not of the exact specimen that was tested.
Yet despite this, the logicians maintain that what is mass-transmitted, experimentally established, or intuitively grasped remains confined to those who possess such knowledge and therefore cannot serve as proof against anyone else. One replies: the very same could be said of smells, tastes, and tactile perceptions—and in fact people’s participation in mass-transmitted reports is far greater. A report conveyed by a large multitude is heard by a vast audience who share in receiving it from a great many transmitters, especially when those transmitters number in the hundreds or thousands. A single band among them thereby attains certain knowledge through tawātur; when that band relates it to another, and they to another, and they to yet another, knowledge by tawātur spreads to nations whose number only Allah can reckon. By contrast, what is apprehended through the senses is limited to the one who experiences it. Thus, if someone says, “I saw,” “I heard,” “I tasted,” “I touched,” or “I smelled,” how can he fashion from that statement a proof binding upon someone else? Even if several people shared those very sensory experiences with him, it does not follow that others perceived them as well, and anyone who did not sense them can only come to know of them by means of report.
Accordingly, if the philosophers claim that a mass-transmitted report pertains only to sensory matters and therefore cannot constitute proof against an opponent, then sensory perception itself is even more restricted—so no proof could be established on its basis either. Indeed, there is no broader commonality in sensory data at all.