and He never called it creation, and it is an established, intuitive certainty that speech is what the speaker himself utters—it is not something separate from him. For that reason he said:

“This stated text (1) in a clear Arabic tongue (2) needs no commentary; it is manifest.”

That is, Allah’s own clarification of what He mentioned as His Speech (3), and that it is indeed His Speech (4), is plain to everyone; it is neither obscure nor among the ambiguous matters that need explanation. Rather, it is the Jahmi (5)—who treats it as a created thing detached from Him like any other creature—who distorts these words from their proper places and deviates in the verses of Allah with a corruption and deviation that every sound-natured person recognises.

For this reason you will find that people of sound disposition, when this doctrine is mentioned to them, say, “This man is claiming that the Quran is not Allah’s Speech.” They say this even about someone who says, “The letters of the Quran are created.” Concerning him they say, “He is saying that the Quran is not Allah’s Speech.” They do not debate in terms of “created” or “not created,” because it is ingrained in their nature that anything created and separated from Allah cannot be His Speech.

Thus, whoever says, “Allah did not speak the letters of the Quran; rather, He merely created them in some physical body,” is, in their view, declaring that the Quran is not Allah’s Speech—whether (6) he considers those letters to be the Quran or claims that there is [then] (7) some eternal meaning that alone is Allah’s Speech to the exclusion of all letters.

For what is firmly rooted in human nature, and what the ummah has received generation after generation from its Prophet, is that the Quran—[in its entirety] (8)—is Allah’s Speech, and they have all grasped this explicit meaning.