Even if the Jahmi maintains that the word “speech” may be ascribed to someone who causes another to speak (1)—as in his illustration of a jinn speaking through the tongue of a possessed person—he still concedes that the great majority of people understand speech to be something that inheres in the speaker himself (2). In fact, they have never known speech detached from its speaker at all. As for the affair of the jinn, it is riddled with obscurity and dispute (3), and the very invalidity of the argument that relies on it (4) keeps that example from being obvious to ordinary folk.

If this is so, then—on the Jahmi’s own principles—it would have been obligatory (5) either (6) to forbid people to say, “The Qur’an is the Speech of Allah,” lest they utter falsehood (7), or to explain to them that by “the Speech of Allah” they must mean that Allah created that speech in some other body, as the Jahmiyyah claim when they say He created a thing and then expressed Himself through it. Yet the people were never commanded to make such a clarification, nor were they forbidden to use the phrase, despite the supposed need for such commands and prohibitions; therefore, it is evident that the conclusion which would necessitate those unissued commands is false.

For this reason Imam Ahmad would say to them during the course of rhetorical debate, “How can I say what has never been said?”—that is, no one before us has ever uttered this statement, and had it been part of the religion, saying it would have been obligatory. The fact that the early generations never voiced it proves that it is not from the religion.

The same line of reasoning was employed by Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Adhramī (8), the shaykh