It is well known that the early generations would say:

“The Qur’an is not created.”

By contrast, the Muʿtazilites, the Kullābiyyah, and those who agreed with them among scholars of ḥadīth, jurisprudence, and Sufism acknowledged only two possibilities: either something is eternal or it is created. Thus, in their view, the Lord alone is eternal—without His attributes according to the Muʿtazilah, or together with His attributes according to the Kullābiyyah—while everything else is a created entity, separate from God, brought into being after not having existed.

They therefore assumed that anyone who said, “The Qur’an is uncreated,” meant that it is an eternal reality inseparable from the Divine Essence, not subject to His will or power, and that it is impermissible to say He is able to speak or that He speaks by His will. This is one of the two opinions reported from Abū Ḥanīfah, Aḥmad, al-Shāfiʿī, Mālik, and others.

Both positions have been cited among Imam Aḥmad’s followers: Abū Bakr ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz records them in his book, and Abū ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Ḥāmid in his work on doctrinal principles. The second view—which is the position of the majority of ḥadīth scholars, the foremost authorities of the Sunnah, and a number of theologians from