These people concurred with the Jahmiyyah in denying of Allah, with respect to speech, everything that the Jahmiyyah had denied, and in declaring that this is created just as the Jahmiyyah declared it created. Yet they parted with them in that they affirmed that the meaning of the Qur’an is uncreated (1). They maintained, “The speech of Allah is the name for that which inheres in Him and is an attribute of His (2); it is not a name for what He creates in something else.” Accordingly, they stated without qualification that the Qur’an is uncreated, even though they did not intend by that the entire sense understood by the salaf, the leading Imams, and the general body of Muslims, but only part of it (3). In the same way, the Jahmiyyah also say unrestrictedly, “The Qur’an is the speech of Allah,” yet they do not mean by it what the salaf, the Imams, and the masses mean. This group, however, denied that these letters are part of Allah’s speech, whereas the thorough-going Jahmiyyah did call them the speech of Allah, but added that they are nevertheless created. The present group, by contrast, does not regard what they themselves term “the speech of Allah” to be created. Some of them likewise refer to the letters as the speech of Allah only by way of a shared designation (4,5), while most of them say, “We call it that only figuratively” (6).

Moreover, this sect (7) posited a single meaning subsisting within the Lord’s Essence, which is