None of them ever said that God only later acquired the attribute of speaking after previously not possessing it, nor did any of them deny the everlasting nature of God’s action or that He has always spoken whenever He wills. On the contrary, they maintained that God speaks with a voice and that He calls out with a voice, just as the revealed texts indicate. Yet they never claimed that He speaks apart from His power and will; more than one of them—Imam Ahmad among others—stated this explicitly, and the rest concurred.

Many scholars—such as Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Nuʿaym ibn Ḥammād, al-Buwayṭī (the disciple of al-Shāfiʿī), and others—reasoned that the Qur’an is uncreated by citing God’s words:

“His command, when He wills a thing, is only to say to it, ‘Be!’—and it is” (Yā Sīn 36:82).

If the word “Be” were itself created, none of the created realm would ever come to exist, for that “Be” would need yet another created “Be,” and so on endlessly, leaving nothing in existence.

Someone who has not grasped the depth of their discourse or the true state of affairs might imagine that their argument seeks to invalidate infinite regress absolutely, and that this would contradict their affirmation that God has always been a Speaker whenever He wills—thereby imputing inconsistency to them. The reality is otherwise. Infinite regress (tasalsul) is of two kinds: regress in causal agents, which is unanimously impossible, and regress in produced effects, over which there is disagreement—many dialecticians allow it, while many do not. The statements of the leading imams rest on the view that permits it, distinguishing clearly between the two.

A regress in causal agents would mean that nothing could ever exist—as explained earlier—for if one entity cannot exist until another exists, and that other cannot exist until yet another exists, and so forth without end, one posits a chain of beings all newly originated after non-existence, all in need of someone to bring them into being, with none capable of producing anything on its own or of subsisting by itself.