I know of no transmitted report obliging one to call it “created” in Arabic; the disagreement, rather, is purely conceptual. From this point the confusion surrounding the issues of Allah’s Speech and Allah’s actions began: people imposed upon the words they heard the meanings current in their own usage, and many of them therefore misunderstood the statements of the early generations and of the leading scholars—indeed, they even misread the words of Allah and His Messenger. Anyone who wishes to grasp a speaker’s intent must return to the speaker’s own language and customary manner of address; we may not interpret his intent according to the conventions we ourselves are used to. How many errors have crept in upon those who are not versed in a speaker’s purpose and idiom!

The same happened to many people regarding His words,

“No reminder newly revealed (muhdath) from their Lord ever comes to them …” (Qur’an 21:2).

They assumed that “muhdath” and “qadīm” in the Arabic language of the Qur’an are identical to “muhdath” and “qadīm” in the terminology of the scholastic theologians—terms defined as, respectively, what has no beginning to its existence and what is not preceded by non-existence. Thus anything that arises after non-existence is, for them, muhdath, and whatever has a first moment of existence is likewise muhdath. They then disputed whether that which merely precedes something else may be called qadīm in a literal or only in a figurative sense, and they formed two opinions on the matter.

In the Arabic of the Qur’an, however, qadīm is simply the opposite of muhdath, and both are relative notions: what precedes another thing is qadīm in relation to that later thing, and the later thing is muhdath in relation to the earlier. Both may still be muhdath with respect to what is before them, and both may be qadīm with respect to what comes after them. Nowhere in Qur’anic usage is the word qadīm employed except for something that is prior to something else, even though it itself has come into existence after non-existence; yet that which has never ceased to exist is, more than anything else, entitled to the name of qidam.