Most High, when He creates something, must either create it within Himself, within something other than Himself, or as something subsisting independently. He refuted all three possibilities.

There is no doubt that the Muʿtazila say that He created it within something other than Himself. Abd al-Azīz refuted this with the rational argument commonly employed by Ahl al-Sunnah: it is necessarily known in Islam that the Quran is Allah’s speech. If it were created in a locus other than Himself, it would follow that every utterance created in a locus is Allah’s speech, since both stand in the same relation to Allah. It would also follow that the speech Allah Most High creates in skins, hands, and feet is Allah’s speech. Thus, if they say:

“Allah, who has made everything speak, has made us speak, and He created you” (Fussilat: 21),

the one speaking would be the very One who made them speak. Bishr did not belong to the Qadariyya; rather, he acknowledged that Allah Most High creates people’s acts. Abd al-Azīz therefore showed that Bishr’s position entailed that every creature’s speech is Allah’s speech—even utterances of unbelief and obscenity. This implication was explicitly affirmed by those Jahmīs who held that Allah indwells creation, including proponents of union between Allah and creation and others like them, such as the author of al-Fusūs (The Bezels) and al-Futūhāt al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Revelations). They said:

“All speech in existence is His speech;
Prose or verse—to us, it is all the same.”