Furthermore, you have not established what the beginningless “inner” speech you affirm actually is. Indeed, you have not even conceived of it. Affirming something presupposes conceiving of it, so how can someone legitimately affirm something he has not conceived of?

For this reason, Abū Saʿīd ibn Kullāb—the leader of this group and its foremost authority on this question—offers nothing intelligible in explaining it. Rather, he says, “It is a meaning incompatible with silence and muteness.” Yet silence and muteness can only be conceived once speech is conceived: a silent person is someone who refrains from speaking, while a mute person is someone incapable of speech, or whose organs of speech have suffered an impairment that prevents him from speaking. Thus, one cannot understand silence and muteness until one understands speech, yet one cannot understand speech until one understands silence and muteness.

It is therefore clear that they have neither conceived of what they assert nor established it. Rather, in their account of speech, they resemble the Christians in their account of the Word and their assertions concerning the “hypostases,” the Trinity, and “union”: they assert things they neither conceive of nor explain.

When the “messengers,” peace be upon them, inform us of something we cannot conceive of, we must believe them. But whatever is established through reason must be conceived of by the person asserting it; otherwise, he is speaking without knowledge. The Christians speak without knowledge, and so their discourse is contradictory and yields no intelligible account. Likewise, whoever speaks about Allah’s speech without knowledge falls into contradiction and produces no intelligible account.

For this reason, one criticism levelled against these people was that, concerning a foundation of their religion and the true nature of speech—Allah’s speech and the speech of all creation—they relied as proof upon the words of a Christian poet called al-Akhtal:

“Speech lies indeed within the heart;
The tongue was made only to reveal the heart.”