and the prohibition has a form that the language has assigned to it which, by itself, indicates that it is (1) a prohibition; the declarative statement has a form assigned to it (2) in the language that, by itself, indicates that it is a statement; and universality has a form assigned to it in the language that, by itself, conveys the inclusion of the whole genus and the entirety of the class (3). This, they hold, is a finer formulation than that proposed by those—such as Ibn ʿAqīl—who sought to amend their wording and claimed that the better expression would be: “The imperative is a form.” (4)

They reply: “The imperative, the prohibition, and the statement are themselves the very forms—namely, the composed and ordered letters.” What he asserted and they rejected is erroneous; and even if it were correct it would only be so on the view of those who say that speech is nothing but letters and sounds that point to a meaning. That, however, is not the position of the jurists, the Imams of Islam, and the People of the Sunnah, even though many who affiliate themselves with them—as the Muʿtazilah did—have made such a claim. Rather, their view is that speech (kalām) is a term encompassing both letters and meanings together. Accordingly, an imperative is neither the mere utterance nor the mere meaning; when the word “imperative” is used without qualification, it comprises both the utterance and the meaning.

For this reason it was said of the imperative: “It is a form,” just as one may say of a human being: “He is a body,” or, “He is a spirit,” (5) just as one may speak of speech as consisting of meaning and of letters.

As for what Abū al-Qāsim al-Dimashqī (6) reported—that in this issue Abū Isḥāq al-Ashʿarī (7) differed—it is replied to him: This very question is the most characteristic point of al-Ashʿarī’s doctrine, one that