just as surely as you yourselves speak.” (1)
The words that convey these meanings are among the most familiar of all terms, and their meanings are among the clearest notions lodged in the hearts of both laypeople and scholars.
As for the “meaning” which they maintain is the very essence of speech (2), it must either be sheer nullity—with no reality beyond knowledge, will, and the utterance that indicates them—or it must be something real. If it has no reality, your entire claim collapses; and if it does have a reality, then without doubt it is an obscure reality fiercely contested (3), one that most groups within the ahl al-qiblah and others besides them neither grasp nor acknowledge (4). Whenever you try to prove it, you do so only by means of subtle, hidden arguments (5); indeed, some of you admit that this reality cannot be known in the observable realm, yet you still assert its existence in the unseen. Given that, it becomes impossible
(1) Surah adh-Dhariyat 51:23.
(2) The Ashʿarites maintain that Allah does not speak with speech composed of letters and sounds but rather with kalām al-nafs (psychical speech), i.e. the meaning residing in the soul. In al-Rāzī’s al-Muhassal Afkār al-Mutaqaddimīn wal-Muta’akhkhirīn (p. 174) he remarks: “As for the meaning our associates assert, it is not agreed upon, and no one except our associates has held it.” The Ashʿarite position on the issue of divine speech is examined in depth in the study of the book’s topics. Al-Shaykh (may God have mercy on him) will refute this interpretation, showing that it was unknown before Ibn Kullāb and arose only after al-Ashʿarī. They nonetheless affirm God’s speech—by consensus and by prophetic transmission—in the forms of command, prohibition, and report: what both the general public and the scholars call simply kalām (speech). They further insist that Allah spoke through the entire Qurʾān, in its letters and meanings, thereby demonstrating the weakness of the Ashʿarite doctrine.
(3) The Muʿtazilites also debated this issue, arguing that divine speech denotes an active, volitional attribute (sifa fi‘liyya) rather than a psychical one, and hence they rejected psychical speech. The Ashʿarites countered their proofs, as recorded by al-Amīdī in Ghayā al-Marām fī ʿIlm al-Kalām (pp. 94–101), al-Rāzī in al-Muhassal (p. 173), and al-Juwaynī in al-Irshād (p. 104).
(4) In S it reads: yaqrun.
(5) In the base text it reads khafīfa. The variant attested in S and T may suit the context better.