in which there is no division or fragmentation—so that the Torah is identical to the Gospel, and the Gospel identical to the Qur’an: if it is rendered in Arabic it becomes the Qur’an, if rendered in Syriac it is the Gospel, and if rendered in Hebrew it is the Torah.
The Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—also reported that it is narrated from the Kulabiyyah and the Ash‘arīs that “Allah has no speech on earth, that this Qur’an which the Muslims recite is not the speech of Allah, and that Allah has no speech on earth at all; rather, it is merely a report or an expression of the speech of Allah” (1).
This same faction went on to say: “The speech of Allah is nothing but a meaning that subsists in His Essence; the letters of the Qur’an are not part of Allah’s speech, nor did Allah pronounce them, and Allah does not speak with letter or sound…” (2).
Elsewhere the Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—remarked: “Furthermore, this group posited a single meaning residing in the Lord’s Essence—command and prohibition, statement and question all at once—and claimed it is the very meaning of the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qur’an…” (3).
Ibn al-Qayyim alluded to this self-contradiction when he said:
They claim the Qur’an is but report and narration—
So, by their claim, we say there are two Qur’ans.
The one we recite is created, as al-Walīd declared
And as the two sects who came after him affirmed.
The other—an ageless meaning—abides within the Self,
Never heard from the Judge of all creation.
Command is the very same as prohibition, His question
The very same as statement: a single, solitary thing.
It is the Psalms, the Torah, and likewise the Gospel,
The Remembrance and the Criterion—one and the same.
All of it, in their eyes, is but a single entity
That admits no partition in thought (4).
3 – If, as the deniers and nullifiers maintain, Allah Most High is not a Speaker and is not described with speech—a quality of perfection—then it would follow that He, exalted be He, resembles inanimate objects that cannot speak, so that any animal capable of speech would be more perfect than He—far exalted is Allah above what they say, infinitely exalted.