This is the position adopted by many scholars of kalām, ḥadīth, and jurisprudence from among the followers of Abū Ḥanīfah, Aḥmad, al-Shāfiʿī, and others.

The third category consists of what subsists in the very Essence of the Lord while still occurring by His power and will. Because it inheres in the Essence, it is classed among the essential attributes, yet because it is linked to will and power, it is also counted among the active attributes. According to the third group, the Divine Speech belongs to this category.

Once we grasp the source of people’s textual and rational confusion concerning God’s speech, the same confusion is seen regarding His actions. Those—such as the Muʿtazilah and the like—who admit only two possibilities, that a thing is either eternal in itself or a created entity distinct from Him, and who acknowledge that God is the Creator of all things, infer from this that God remained eternally idle with respect to action—or with respect to both action and speech—without beginning, and then acted or spoke without any cause whatsoever that called for it.

Many of them further assert that He will likewise remain idle for all eternity, doing nothing and saying nothing: He neither acted nor spoke, then He will cease to act or speak. Accordingly, the span during which He spoke and acted is, in their view, bounded at both ends.

They imagine this to be the very religion brought by the messengers and revealed in the Scriptures, and they render the prophetic message in their own terminology, saying, “The world is originated, and ‘the world’ means everything other than God.”

The upshot, however, is that God would have been perpetually devoid of action and speech until He produced the world for no reason at all; the mere existence of an omnipotent, freely choosing agent is thought to tip the scales between two identical possibilities with no determining factor—like a hungry man offered two identical loaves, or a fugitive when there appears to him—