Thus these people and others like them busied themselves with stripping the Lord of action and of speech. They said that His speech is created, or that only its species is originated, or that the very instance of it is originated—in other words, that speech occurred after a prior state in which He was not speaking in pre-eternity and, in their view, was not even capable of speaking. Even when some of them loosely concede that He has always been capable, they still insist that the object of that power was impossible in pre-eternity; and it is obvious that, if the object of power is impossible, genuine power itself is impossible. They went on to claim that this is the very doctrine of the world’s origination proclaimed by the messengers, attributing the view to all the followers of the revealed religions—and so did their philosophical opponents.

Because of this misconception, the philosophers prevailed over the adherents of the religions, imagining that this was indeed their creed, until matters reached the point where the philosophers alleged that the messengers did not convey true knowledge at all but only spoke in images and persuasive analogies. Yet it is well known that neither the Book of God, nor any ḥadīth of the Messenger of God, nor any report from the Companions, the Successors, or the leading scholars of the Muslims contains anything of these assertions or anything that entails them. Rather, they are innovations in the religion—speculative kalām that the Salaf and the imams repudiated, censured, and condemned.

Equally, the claim of those others that the heavens are eternal and will never be rent asunder is an even graver form of heresy, misguidance, and contradiction of the messengers’ religion. These [philosophers] affirmed the pre-eternity of created entities, while those [theologians] denied the Lord’s lasting power to act and speak, limiting themselves to the origination of the species of acts.

The same pattern appears in the question of the Qur’an. A faction asserted the pre-eternity of the individual utterances of divine speech—whether they spoke of one specific meaning, of designated letters, or of particular sounds and letters. They even said that what Moses heard was eternal, that God has never ceased to be characterized by it, and that only the hearing itself was new; and they claimed that He did not actually call out to him at that moment, contrary to the clear indication of the Qur’an.