Some have said that this is not his poetry. Even supposing that it is, neither rational truths nor the meaning of the word “speech,” as used by all the children of Adam, can be determined by appealing to the words of a thousand accomplished poets, let alone a Christian poet named al-Akhtal. The Christians are known to make false claims concerning Allah’s Word. In Arabic, khatal means error in speech. As one poet recited concerning them:
“Shame on him who casts the Quran behind his back,
Then, when offering proof, says: ‘Al-Akhtal said.’”
When the Kullābiyyah advanced this argument, the Muʿtazilah countered:
“In our view, speech is like action as both you and we understand it. We all hold that in pre-eternity He was not acting, then began to act. Yet neither we nor you say that in pre-eternity He was incapable or silent. Just as He was not acting, yet is not described by the opposite of action—incapacity or silence—so He was not speaking, yet is not described by the opposite of speech—silence or muteness.”
When these people say to the Muʿtazilah and Jahmiyyah, “In both our view and yours, action does not subsist in Him, whereas speech subsists in Him and is therefore like the attributes,” the Muʿtazilah reject this and say: “In our view, speech is like action: neither the one nor the other subsists in Him.”
If they then say, “If speech did not subsist in Him, it would subsist in another, and speech would be an attribute of that other,” they have moved on to “the second argument.” The first could not be established except through the second; thus, reasoning from the first and making it “a second argument” was invalid. For this reason, many of their later scholars abandoned it and relied only on “the second,” as did Abū al-Maʿālī and his followers.