in Arabic is not His speech, or does His speech consist of the letters, or the letters and sounds, in which the Quran and other revelation were sent down, these being individually eternal? There are two views.

Among those who maintain that the individual letters and sounds are eternal, some do not say that they are one and the same. Rather, they say that they are multiple, though infinite in number. They affirm that infinitely many letters, or letters and meanings, exist simultaneously, and that they have always existed and will always exist. This was one of the things that led people to say that Allah’s speech is created and that He has no speech subsisting in His essence. For they held that whatever is uncreated must be individually eternal; since they regarded the latter as impossible, the former was the only remaining possibility.

The other two groups said: “The former is impossible, so the latter is the only remaining possibility.”

They adopted these views only because they assumed that nothing occurring by His choice could subsist in Him—neither speech by His choice nor anything other than speech—as has been explained elsewhere.

This principle—namely, the view that temporally originated events subsist in Him—is the position of Hishām ibn al-Hakam, Hishām al-Jawālīqī, Ibn Mālik al-Hadramī, and ‘Alī ibn al-Haytham