their argument against the Muʿtazilites, for they say: whenever speech subsists in a locus its ruling reverts to that very locus, and it would then be admissible to assert that the speech is a created thing which He brought into existence in something other than Himself while still being, in reality, His speech. In this way they incur the same reprehensible consequence that befalls the Muʿtazilites, for the Salaf and the leading imams compelled them to acknowledge that it would have been the tree that said to Moses: innanī anā Allah lā ilāha illā anā (Indeed, I—yes, I—am Allah; there is no deity except Me) (1).

Moreover, once al-Rāzī and others discovered the weakness of their proofs for the alleged impossibility of temporal events inhering [in God], he could no longer rely on that principle in the question of the Qur’an. Instead, he advanced a textual argument—one of the frailest of proofs—whereby he affirmed the so-called intrinsic speech by the well-known method, and then declared (2): “Once this is established, it follows that it is one and that it is eternal, for everyone who has affirmed it has said as much; no one has ever distinguished between the two.” Thus he set it forth in Nihāyat al-ʿUqūl.

It is evident, however, that this proof would not be accepted by the meticulous jurists as sufficient even for a secondary legal issue (3). In this book (4) we have exposed their self-contradiction in this matter in nearly one hundred rational ways. One of the distinguished scholars once asked the jurist Abū Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Salām (5) concerning the Qur’an: “How can a single entity be both a command—”