Thus they made the will that governs guidance and misguidance belong to the servant, not to God, and in so doing they fell into the grossest of errors and the most contorted speech. Yet the will cannot possibly be ascribed to the servant when the Name “Allah” stands as the subject according to the unanimous reading of the Qur’an reciters. Had any of them construed “Allah” in the accusative, it would have drawn them a little closer to the meaning they seek, though even that is grammatically impermissible; for the sentence would then have to include the particle min, so that its sense became: “Whomever wills from Allah that He guide him, He opens his breast to Islam.” The min would afterwards be dropped, leaving “Allah” in the accusative because the connective particle had been removed—just as the Arabs say, “Whoever steals the people their property, cut (his hand),” meaning, “Whoever steals from the people their property.” Such an ellipsis is allowed only with a very small number of particles attested in native speech; we may not impose it on others or analogize from it.

They also said about the Almighty’s words, “We have created for Hell many of the jinn and humankind” (al-Aʿrāf 7:179), that the verb means “We drove and cast them” into it. One of them even argued by citing the line of al-Muthaqqab al-ʿAbdī describing his camel:

She says, whenever I push upon her my saddle-pad,
“Is this forever his practice—and mine?”

This is nothing but ignorance of the language and a misreading. The poet’s word is darāʾtu, with a dāl (undotted), whereas God’s word is dharanā, with a dhāl (dotted). I suspect they were misled because they had heard the Arabs say, “The mount adharat its rider from its back,” meaning it threw him off, and so imagined that dharanā belonged to that same root.