hold for the other attributes, such as knowledge, life, hearing, and sight, since they produce no effect.

He said: “The truth is that the objection he raised against the view that speech is one, with differences arising only from its relations and their objects, is difficult to resolve. Perhaps someone else has its solution. Because it is so difficult to answer, some of our companions have resorted to saying that Allah’s speech, which subsists in His Essence, consists of five distinct attributes: command, prohibition, report, inquiry, and calling.”

[Ibn Taymiyya’s commentary]

These are his words.

The response is as follows:

To say that speech consists of five attributes, or seven, or nine, or any other number, does not remove the considerations already mentioned that necessitate a multiplicity of speech.

You have seen that whoever maintains that the meaning of speech is one must consequently maintain that all the attributes are one, then abolish them altogether and identify them with the Essence itself. This leads back to the position of those who say that existence is one and do not distinguish between being numerically one and being one in kind. For whoever allows diverse realities to be one and the same thing leaves no distinction between these two cases. This is akin to saying that the knower is knowledge, and knowledge is power.