The second group concurred with them that the Divine Speech is beginningless and that God does not speak by His will and power. In their view, every specific utterance is an inseparable, intrinsic attribute of His essence; nothing exists except an eternal reality that is necessarily concomitant with Him. Anything created, distinct from Him, or contingent upon His will and power and subsisting in His essence—they denied. Like the first party, they asserted that contingent events can arise without a new cause and that mere will may tip the balance between two equivalent possibilities, even when the time of acting and all other factors are identical. They declared that an able agent may prefer one of two identical alternatives without any determining factor.

Later, however, they judged the opinion of those others—that Arabic speech is not God’s speech, that He neither uttered it nor ever utters, and that His speech is nothing but a single abstract meaning made up of diverse realities—to be contrary to both reason and transmitted evidence.

They therefore said: The eternal speech consists of letters and sounds; some even restricted it to letters alone, excluding the sounds. These letters, they claimed, are eternally pre-existent in their very selves: we do not affirm the coming into being of one thing after another. God, they maintained, has unceasingly been saying, “O Adam, O Noah, O Moses,” from pre-eternity to everlasting, and He will never cease to do so. According to them the letters are joined to one another in pre-eternity: the yā’ and the sīn, for example, exist together from all eternity, and the sequence between them is only an ordering in their very natures or in the manner of their manifestation, not in their existence.