and if speech were something created that inhered in a particular body, that body itself would be the speaker. Thus the tree would have been the one that addressed Moses, saying,

“Indeed, I am Allah; there is no deity but Me, so worship Me and establish prayer for My remembrance.” (1)

Such is the doctrine of the early generations of this Community and its foremost Imams.
As for anyone who claims that the speaker is merely the one who brings speech into existence, he must also concede that every utterance Allah creates in any locus would then be His own speech: His causing skins to speak would be His speech, and His giving speech to any articulate creature would likewise be His speech.
This is precisely the view adopted by the ittihādiyyah among the Jahmites and Hululites, who say that His very existence is identical with the existence of all beings. One of them even declaims:

Every word that exists is His word—
Whether cast in prose or couched in verse, it is all the same to us. (2)

Yet the Muʿtazilites are sounder than you, for they called (3) this Qur’an that Gabriel brought down “the Speech of Allah,” as the rest of the Muslims do, whereas you deemed it His speech only metaphorically. And those among you who considered it literal speech, maintaining that the word “speech” is equivocal—such as Abū al-Maʿālī and his followers (4)—thereby undermined their own axiom that the speaker of speech is the one in whom that speech subsists.

Nor can you adopt the stance of Ahl al-Sunnah, for Ahl al-Sunnah affirm that speech belongs to the one who originates it, not to the one who merely transmits and delivers it. When a man conveys the Prophet’s statement—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—“Actions are only by intentions, and every person shall receive only what he intended,” (5) he is indeed conveying the Prophet’s speech by means of his own movements and sounds; and likewise… (6)