and others—is a fabricated lie. Neither Ahmad nor any Muslim scholar ever said this, whether among Ahmad’s followers or anyone else.”

I brought out a booklet I had brought along with the creed. It contained Ahmad’s own words, as reported from Imam Ahmad by Shaykh Abū Bakr al-Khallāl in The Book of the Sunnah, together with what his companion Abū Bakr al-Marwadhī had collected of Imam Ahmad’s statements and those of the imams of his time and his other companions:

“Whoever says, ‘My utterance of the Quran is created,’ is a Jahmī; whoever says, ‘It is uncreated,’ is an innovator.”

I said: “This is precisely what al-Ash‘arī reported from Ahl al-Sunnah and the scholars of hadith in his Book of Doctrines, and he stated that he himself held this view.”

I said: “What, then, of someone who says, ‘My utterance is eternal’? What of someone who says, ‘My voice is uncreated’? What of someone who says, ‘My voice is eternal’?”

Imam Ahmad’s explicit statements distinguish between Allah speaking with a voice and the servant’s voice, as transmitted by al-Bukhārī, the compiler of the Sahīh, in The Creation of Human Actions, and by other imams of the Sunnah.

I also brought my answer to a question I had been asked long before, concerning someone who had sworn an oath of divorce regarding the question of “letters and voice” and the question of “the apparent meaning concerning the Throne.” I cited portions of that earlier answer and its detailed discussion of this question, including the point that to state without qualification that