and even more forceful; indeed, denying that the Qur’an is the speech of Allah, according to those people, is plainer and more evident. (1) Yet, upon closer examination, those others also profess the same view, so in reality they are more impious with respect to Allah’s names and His verses, whereas the former group merely voices a more frivolous assertion. (2)

The Seventy-Eighth Point:
The foremost scholars of every faction—whether among the jurists, the ḥadith experts, or the theologians—have always declared that the doctrine propounded by Ibn Kullāb and al-Ashʿarī regarding the Qur’an and divine speech—that it is an eternal meaning subsisting in the Divine Essence and that the letters are not part of speech—is an innovation, opposed to the teaching of the earliest generations of the ummah and its leading imams, and contradicted by a prior consensus. Even those who admire al-Ashʿarī, extolling him for his refutations of the major innovators among the Muʿtazilah, the Rāfiḍah, and the like, defending him against those who censure or curse him, and advising on his behalf among the leading scholars of the various schools, acknowledge this fact. They say, “We disagree with him on that point,” and place it among the views of his that are to be set aside, for every scholar has lapses that must be left. Others simply refrain from championing this position or calling people to it, knowing the contradiction and confusion it contains. Consider, for example, what Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd-Allāh ibn Yūsuf al-Juwaynī—the father of Abū al-Maʿālī— (3) recorded at the end of a work he composed (4) entitled “The Creed of the Followers of the Imām al-Muṭṭalibī al-Shāfiʿī and All Ahl al-Sunnah.”