Yet there is a faction among them who say: “Our utterance of the Qur’an—or (1) the sound that is heard from us—is uncreated,” or, “From us one hears both a created sound and an uncreated sound.” This claim, however, has been repudiated by their own senior scholars and by the great majority of their adherents (2).

Others recount, quoting the earlier proponents, that Allah has no speech on earth, that the Qur’an recited by the Muslims is not the speech of Allah, and that what we possess here is merely a ḥikāyah (narration) or ʿibārah (expression) of Allah’s speech. In conveying this, they are truthful (3), for such was indeed the stance of those first innovators. They were the earliest to introduce into Islam the doctrines of ḥikāyah and ʿibārah—an innovation the Muslims have attributed to Ibn Kullāb and al-Ashʿarī.

Ibn Kullāb declared that the letters are only a ḥikāyah of Allah’s speech and are not themselves part of it, because, he contended, speech must subsist in the speaker, and it is impossible for letters and sounds to subsist in Allah. In this negation he concurred with the Jahmiyyah and the Muʿtazilah (4).

After him came al-Ashʿarī (5)—who agreed with Ibn Kullāb on most of his foundational principles—and he said: “A ḥikāyah must be identical to that which it relates, whereas the letters are not identical to the meaning (6); rather, they are an ʿibārah (expression) of the meaning and a sign (7) pointing to it.”

They and their followers therefore maintain that calling this “the speech of Allah” is figurative, not literal, and they openly state that none of the Muslims has ever heard Allah’s speech, along with other such assertions.