—from Allah, so it would no longer be His speech; it would have been turned into a created thing, and thus would not be the speech of Allah.

Accordingly, the leading scholars declared, “This is the speech of Allah, and it is uncreated.” By this statement they were not alluding to any attribute of a creature; rather, they were pointing to the very speech of Allah that He uttered and that His Messenger conveyed on His behalf. The messenger only delivered it through the attributes that belong to himself, and in such contexts the demonstrative “this” is meant to refer to the delivered speech, not to the means by which it was delivered.

On occasion the second meaning—the means—may be intended, but only with an explicit qualification, just as happens with the word “name.” When one says, “I worshipped Allah” or “I supplicated Allah,” the object of worship or supplication is not the name, the spoken word itself; rather, it is the One who is designated by that word. Because of this, some people began to say, “The name is other than the One named.”

One of them was even told, “I say: I called upon Allah.” He replied, “Do not say it like that; instead say: I called upon the One named ‘Allah.’” This mistaken individual assumed that if you say, “I called upon Allah,” you must be referring to calling upon the very word. The same objection can be leveled against his alternative phrasing.

In reality, whenever something is expressed by a name, the intent of the name is the thing named, for names are mentioned only to make their referents known, not because the name itself is identical with the essence of the referent. Hence whoever claims that the uttered word together with the meaning that resides in the heart is identical with the One named is plainly in error. Likewise, whoever says that what is meant by the name in statements such as, “I called upon Allah and I worshipped Him,”