would be meaningless, for (1) any speech that inheres in created beings can be heard by everyone, just as they hear the speech He causes in inanimate objects, and just as they have heard the speech He causes in living creatures. Moreover, He has drawn a distinction between revelation (waḥy) and speaking from behind a veil; were His Speech nothing but words He creates in something else, with no Speech belonging to Him, that distinction would disappear. He has also differentiated this from the case in which He sends a messenger who then conveys, by His permission, whatever He wills. If that messenger heard only words created in some creature, this would be of the very same kind as the created sounds that human beings hear; both situations would then amount to speech from behind a veil, and Allah would never speak to the angels at all except from behind a veil.

His words, “from behind a veil,” are themselves proof that He does, in fact, speak to whom He wills without a veil, as the widely transmitted Sunnah reports (2) from the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—make clear. When the Jahmites introduced these innovations, the predecessors of the ummah and its leading scholars, drawn from the remaining Successors and their followers, repudiated them in the strongest terms, and they began to expose the most persuasive of those dubious claims—such as their statement, “The Qur’an …”