—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—when drawing up the peace treaty between himself and Quraysh, in which he wrote:

“This is what Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh has agreed upon with Suhayl ibn ‘Amr.”

This was after the polytheists had refused to write “Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah.” He—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—is distinguished before Allah by his status as Messenger and Prophet. When he changed from being identified by the description that requires people to accept his truthfulness and believe in him, he agreed to their identifying him by his father’s name.

The point is that some people say that whenever an expression has two meanings within a single language, those meanings necessarily share something in common. Indeed, they maintain this even regarding letters, holding that there is a correspondence between them and their meanings which motivates the speaker to assign a particular expression to a particular meaning.

No reasonable person has ever said that an expression signifies its meaning by itself, without anyone intending it to do so, and that this signification is an inseparable attribute of the expression. There is therefore no basis for the objection: “If an expression bore a correspondence to its meaning, it would not differ from one nation to another.” For matters involving choice, such as expressions and customary actions, do possess correspondences that motivate an agent acting by choice, even though they vary according to place, time, and circumstances.

Natural phenomena that do not result from a creature’s choice also vary. Heat and cold, blackness and whiteness, and similar natural phenomena vary according to the natural characteristics of different lands. Matters involving choice—food, drink, clothing, housing, mounts, marriage, and so forth—vary according to people’s customs