and the very existence of taklīf (the imposition of religious duty) points to His knowledge, and His knowledge, in turn, points—first and foremost—to the reality of truthful speech. Indeed, anyone who knows something is never without an inner utterance about what he knows; that inner utterance is deliberation and disclosure. This may also be put as follows: had the Pre-Eternal One—glorified be He—not been a Speaker, it would have been impossible for Him to convey definition or draw attention to taklīf, for the avenues of definition are well known—writing, verbal expression, and gesture—and none of these can make something known unless they are a rendering of the speech that abides within the self. Whoever possesses no speech at all is therefore incapable of alerting another to a meaning that rests upon speech.

He said:
“Among the proofs for the reality of Allah’s speech are the signs granted to the messengers, peace be upon them. Those signs were evidences, yet they do not indicate truthfulness in and of themselves; rather, they serve as evidence inasmuch as they stand in the place of His saying to the claimant of prophethood, ‘You have spoken the truth.’ Ratification comes from utterances, and a person does not ratify another merely by performing the act of ratification; he ratifies him only because that ratification subsists in his own essence by Allah’s command and prohibition (1).”

I said: Their attempt to prove Allah’s speech by citing taklīf and aḥkām (legal rulings) is to argue for a thing by means of the thing itself—indeed, to argue for it by means of something even more obscure, when one could dispense with such an argument. For if taklīf and aḥkām are established only through the messengers, then all the messengers are unanimously agreed upon conveying Allah’s speech and His message, and upon affirming that Allah says, said, and speaks. It is well known that the messengers’ pronouncements affirming Allah’s speech and His sayings are far more numerous, famous, and manifest than their use of the terms taklīf and aḥkām. So if this proof is accepted only after believing in the messengers and in what they have reported (3), then their report that Allah speaks and says has no need of any further proof. For this reason, others have abandoned this feeble argument and have advanced different proofs for the reality of Allah’s speech.