is in the muṣḥaf, just as every other kind of speech is on paper—this is the unanimous position of the ummah and the settled practice across all Muslim lands. Every level therefore has its own ruling, and the presence of speech in a book is not (1) like the presence of an attribute in the entity it qualifies, such as knowledge and life in the locus (2)(3) that bears them, so that one might claim that an attribute of Allah has descended into something other than Him or become detached from Him. Nor is its presence therein (4) merely evidentiary, like the existence of the universe that points to the Creator, such that one would say, “It contains nothing but a sign indicating Allah’s speech.” Rather, it belongs to a distinct category altogether. Whoever fails to give each level to which the preposition “in” applies its proper due—distinguishing, for example, between a body’s presence in a container and in a place, between the presence of an accident in a body, the presence of an image in a mirror, and distinguishing between seeing something with the physical eye while awake and seeing it with the heart while awake or asleep, and so forth—will inevitably fall into confusion.

Likewise, the question posed about what is in the muṣḥaf, “Is it created or eternal?” is an ambiguous one, for the term “eternal” (5) was not, to begin with, transmitted from the early generations