al-Kinānī in “al-Haydah.” He refuted it without adopting a position contrary to that of the early generations. I have quoted his words and explained them elsewhere.

“The point here” is that the claim that He created speech within Himself can be refuted without adopting the position of either the Kullābiyyah or the Karrāmiyyah. It has become clear that what subsists in His essence cannot be created, since it comes about through His will and power, whereas anything created must have an act of creation. His very act of speaking through His will and power is not an act of creating that speech; rather, through that speaking He creates other things, and an act of creation cannot create itself.

What demonstrates the falsity of the position of the “Kullābiyyah” is that speech can occur only through His will and power, whereas they say that He speaks without His will or power. They say that He speaks without His will or power.

As for the “Karrāmiyyah,” they say that He began speaking after not having done so. This entails that He previously lacked an attribute of perfection, that something came into being without a cause, and that His essence became the locus of a kind of temporal occurrence after not having been so—as the “Karrāmiyyah” allege. This is false.

This is what the early generations refuted by arguing that whatever subsists in Him in the way of speech, will, and action must be either an attribute of perfection or an attribute of deficiency. If it is a perfection, He would have remained deficient until that perfection arose in Him. If it is a deficiency, He would have become deficient after having been perfect.

This argument does not rule out will and speech subsisting in Him as kinds through one instance after another. That entails only that individual instances of will and speech come into being, not that the kind comes into being; and the kind has always been