While at other times they say, “He did speak and He does speak in reality, yet what this means is that He created speech in something other than Himself, which Moses then heard. It is not that speech subsists in His very Self.” This is what certain Muʿtazilah and those of their ilk maintain.

Some men of authority embellished this doctrine, promoted it for a time, made it public, and punished whoever opposed them. Later Allah extinguished that view and reinstated what the earliest generations of the ummah had believed: that the Qur’an, the Torah, and the Gospel are the speech of Allah—He Himself uttered them. They issued from Him, are not separate from Him, and are not a created thing that He produced within something else.

Once Allah had made this plain, and people were reciting His words—

“If one of the polytheists seeks your protection, then grant him protection so that he may hear the words of Allah” (Qur’an 9:6)—

some followers of capricious desires began saying, “All he hears is the voice of the reciter. The reciter’s voice is created, and it is the speech of Allah; therefore the speech of Allah is created.”

Such a person fails to distinguish between hearing speech directly from the one who utters it—as Moses heard it from Allah with no intermediary—and hearing it from someone who merely conveys it on His behalf.

It is obvious that were one to hear the speech of the prophets and others from transmitters, the transmitter’s voice would not be the voice of the one on whose behalf he speaks, even though the words themselves belong to the original speaker, not to the transmitter.

Accordingly, when the speech of Allah is heard from those who convey it from Him, it is even more fitting that it be acknowledged as the speech of Allah.