This is the sense commonly recognized—both in the prophets’ own tongue and in the languages of all nations—when the word is used without qualification, and many other instances could be brought to illustrate the same rule.
Whoever interprets the prophets’ speech in a manner alien to their acknowledged language belongs to the class of people who have altered and distorted their words; the Christians are one such example.
The same principle applies to the titles ʿādil (just) and ẓālim (oppressor) and the like. In the prophets’ idiom, as in ordinary usage, a ʿādil is the person in whom justice inheres and who practices it by his own will and power.
A ẓālim is the one in whom injustice inheres and who commits it by his own power and choice. They do not call a person a ẓālim when the injustice does not subsist in him but is carried out by someone else whom he merely appointed as an agent, nor do they call someone a ẓālim when he did not commit the injustice himself, but another performed it in him.
Accordingly, anyone who labels as an oppressor, unbeliever, or sinner someone who has done none of those deeds—but has merely had them done to him—or who deems a person an oppressor even though no act of oppression attaches to him, but who has caused someone else to possess that injustice and be an oppressor, has departed from the familiar usage of the prophets and of other people.
A still clearer example concerns the terms muḥdath and ḥādith (originated): in the language of every nation they are applied only to that which comes into existence after previously not existing, while makhlūq (created) is even more emphatic than either muḥdath or ḥādith.
Therefore, if someone coins a private terminology by which he designates the qadīm (pre-eternal), azalī (ever-lasting) being—who has never ceased to exist—as “muḥdath,” on the ground that he regards Him as the effect of another cause, and thus calls Him “originated” in this invented sense, he has no right to say, “I am interpreting the prophets’ statement that the heavens and the earth…"