This is one of the views for which the imams of the Sunnah declared its adherents to be disbelievers. They said that it entails that the tree itself said:

“I am Allah; there is no deity except Me, so worship Me.”

For speech belongs to the one in whom it subsists. This is what all people understand, especially since the evidence establishes that Allah gives speech to everyone who speaks. Thus Allah will give speech to people’s skins on the Day of Resurrection, and they will say:

“Allah, who has given speech to all things, has given us speech.”

Thus every utterance in existence would be something He creates in a locus. If what He creates in another were His speech, it would necessarily follow that all speech in existence—even expressions of disbelief, wickedness, and falsehood—was His speech. Exalted is He above that! This is a necessary implication of the position of the determinist Jahmīs. They say that Allah creates His servants’ deeds and words, while, according to them, the servant does nothing and has no power that has any effect in bringing about the act. Hence one of their shaykhs—an adherent of the oneness of existence—said:

All speech in existence is His speech;
Prose or verse—it is all the same to us.

As for the Muʿtazilīs, they do not say that Allah creates His servants’ deeds, but the argument commits them to that conclusion. Their accomplished thinkers, such as Abū al-Husayn al-Basrī, have acknowledged that an act occurs only when there is a motive prompting the agent, and that when the motive and the power are both present, the act must occur. He also said that the motive within the servant is created by Allah. This explicitly affirms the doctrine of Ahl al-Sunnah, even though he did not use the expression “the creation of the servants’ deeds.” If, then, he says that Allah created the motive and the power—and creating them necessarily entails creating the act—he has conceded the point.

Since this was firmly established in the minds of people generally, it was said by Sulaymān ibn