describe Himself with speech at all; rather, its true import is that Allah has never spoken and will never speak, exactly as their first leader, al-Jaʿd ibn Dirham, openly declared when he claimed that Allah did not take Abraham as an intimate friend (khulla) and did not speak to Moses directly. For, he alleged, intimate friendship can arise only from love, yet in his view Allah does not truly love anything, nor does anything truly love Him; therefore He takes no one as a close friend, and likewise, in his estimation, speech is impossible for the Lord Most High.

In the same way, the Jahmites among the Muʿtazilites and others denied that Allah possesses speech subsisting in His Essence or will subsisting in His Essence, advancing assertions that flatly contradict the self-evident dictates of sound reason—that a speaker must of necessity speak by speech that is within him. They further maintained that He also wills by a will that is neither in Him nor in anything else, or that will is merely a privative attribute, or that it is nothing but the created wills, distinct from the command, which in their view is the created sound existing in something outside Him.

The inevitable result of their doctrine, therefore, is to deny the very realities about which the messengers informed us: Allah’s speech, His love, and His will—even though they may assent to the bare phrases used by the messengers. Such is the condition of the hypocritical heretics among the Sabians and the idolaters—from the philosophers, the Qarmaṭites, and the like—in what the messengers reported concerning faith in Allah, the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the prophets, and even in what they commanded. They acknowledge much of what the messengers recounted and magnify their stature, yet they believe in some parts of the Scripture and disbelieve in others.” (1)

4 – The Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—also offered his own decisive rebuttal to those who bore the chief responsibility for fomenting the trial over the claim that the Quran is created. He refuted them with logical proofs, adducing a series of examples that make it impossible for the speech of a speaker to subsist in something external to him and not in his own being. He—may Allah have mercy on him—said:

“When the Jahmites innovated these doctrines midway through the second century AH, the predecessors of the ummah and its leading Imams rejected them. Then, at the beginning of the third century, their affair swelled because of the assistance and falsehood they enlisted from certain rulers, and the well-known inquisition ensued. Throughout it all, the Imams of guidance held fast to what the messengers had brought from Allah: that the Quran is the speech of Allah—He, glorified be He, spoke it; it comes from Him and subsists in Him, and anything of that nature is not created; rather,