Forty-ninth Point:

The essence of their doctrine is the complete negation of both divisions with regard to the Speech of Allah. Reason dictates that speech—whether conceived as a universal or as a particular concrete reality—contains elements that are commands and others that are informative reports. Hence, when one wishes to divide the whole, one says (1): “Speech and utterance are divided into command and prohibition.” Thus the command is an existent reality and the prohibition is an existent reality, and each of the two is termed speech and utterance. But a single, concrete speech that exists outside the mind (2) and is simultaneously both a command and a prohibition cannot exist.

If it is the universal itself that is being subdivided, one says: “Within this existent speech, some is command and some is prohibition.” They, however, maintain that the Speech of Allah is not partly command and partly prohibition, nor partly report; for that would necessitate that it possess parts, and they deny that it has any parts. Nor, in their view, is it a universal divisible into command and prohibition, for that would entail that command be distinct from prohibition. Rather, they regard it as a single meaning subsisting in the One described, a meaning that is itself command, prohibition, [and report] (3).

As for the One so described, the manifest impossibility of the first type of division applying to Him (4) needs no proof: He is not a universal existence that can be partitioned into eternal and temporal, necessary and contingent, Creator and created. Such a notion amounts to denying His very existence—for a universal, as such, has no external reality—and, in addition, to claiming that He could be both Creator and created, eternal and temporal, that is, that some of His “species” would be Creator and others created. It is evident that anything of that sort cannot be the Eternal Creator. Exalted is He, far above what the wrongdoers allege.