Among the verses proving that He speaks word after word is His saying:

“The likeness of Jesus in the sight of God is that of Adam: He created him from dust, then said to him, ‘Be!’—and he was.” (Āl ʿImrān 3:59)

and others of the same tenor.

Their opponents cite proofs showing that speech is an attribute of God abiding in His very Self, and that it is impossible for His speech to consist solely of what He creates in something else. For were speech itself created, its ascription to Him as a distinctive utterance would disappear; it would relate to Him no differently from any other created thing. This would entail that every discourse He created in another being would have to count as His own—since He is the Creator of all things, every utterance would then become His utterance—and that every sound He produced would be His sound. Yet speech can be predicated only of the one in whom it inheres, just as knowledge, life, and motion are predicated only of the subject in whom they exist.

These scholars therefore hold that speech is an attribute of the Essence, not an attribute of action. The majority of ḥadīth scholars, theologians, jurists, Sufis, and others reply that the sound proofs on both sides are valid, and that there is no contradiction between regarding speech as both an essential attribute and an attribute of action. Created realities, they explain, fall into three categories:

1. Attributes of the Essence that bear no relation to will or power, such as life.

2. Things brought into existence that are separate from God; these are the effects (al-mafʿūlāt). Most scholars place the first two categories together under the heading of “actions,” making no distinction between the act and the object acted upon, between creating and the created.

3. Others, while acknowledging only the Eternal and the created, do draw a distinction. They therefore treat “bringing-into-being” (takwīn) as an eternal attribute, just as some do with regard to the divine will.