and moreover, were that utterance truly the speech of Allah (1) Most High, it would follow that Allah Himself was the one who said, “Come, both of you, willingly,” and that is false and erroneous (2).

The fourth argument is that Allah, exalted be He, created speech in the foreleg that the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—once ate; it said, “Do not eat me, for I have been poisoned” (3). This, too, is untenable. The strongest evidence to which the Muʿtazilites cling is the Arabs’ expression, “The jinn spoke on the tongue of the possessed person.” They thus attributed the speech found in the possessed person to the jinn because they believed the jinn to be its producer; had they not believed that the speaker must be the producer of the speech, such an attribution would not have been sound.

The answer is that this may be figurative language, and (4) if it is to be taken literally, perhaps what they meant is that the speech belongs to the jinn while it is near the tongue of the possessed person. With this, enough has been said (5) about the linguistic discussion that yields no rational benefit; what remains is the Muʿtazilite inquiry into Allah’s being described as Speaker.

As for us (6), we affirm for Allah, exalted be He, a speech distinct from these letters and sounds, and we hold that this speech is eternal. Regarding it, the Muʿtazilites take three lines of objection (7):

First, they demand that we convey a conception of the very nature of this speech.

Second, they require us to produce proof that He, exalted be He, is characterized by it.

Third, they ask for proof that it is eternal.

Thus, the disagreement