When you say, “I uttered,” your very words point to an action; yet the Qur’an and that action are mutually dependent, inseparable from one another. Sound and the movement of the tongue do not become recitation until the Qur’an is borne upon them. Other actions and their objects are not like this. Observe: when you say, “I reviled,” “I insulted,” or “I slandered,” your statement indicates both an action and someone reviled, insulted, or slandered—yet each exists on its own, distinct from the other. For that reason we have said that recitation is two things, and the same applies to chanting (tilāwah) and utterance (lafẓ), whereas reviling is but a single thing.

If someone asks, “What is this comparable to?” we reply: Two men looked at a glowing ember. One said, “It is a body,” and the other said, “It is fire.” They argued, the matter escalated, and each swore a divorce oath that what he had said was true. They then went to a jurist and explained, “We disagreed about an ember: one of us said it is a body, the other said it is fire. We persisted until each of us swore an oath of divorce on his claim.” The jurist said to each, “You are both correct. You have spoken of a single thing that possesses two meanings, but each of you mentioned only one of them.”

The ember is like recitation: each is a single term that combines two meanings—the body and the fire in the former, the action and the Qur’an in the latter. Had either disputant said, “It is both body and fire,” he would have embraced both categories, just as the one who says, “Recitation is both an action and the Qur’an,” encompasses its two aspects.

Similarly, if two people disagreed about a star, one asserting, “It is fire,” and the other, “It is light,” both would be right, because the word star holds two meanings: fire and light. If they differed over the act of human eating—one saying, “It is chewing,” and the other, “It is swallowing”—again both would be correct, for eating includes both chewing and swallowing. And if they disputed about killing, one saying, “It is wounding,” and the other, “It is death,” both would be correct, because killing comprises two elements: the act and the resulting death.

After all this clarification, there remains a subtle point in which a listener may still err, namely when the hearer