“If the only way we can give you a conclusive answer that dispels your specious argument—apart from an answer based on your own premises—is either to agree with you in something contrary to revelation and reason, or to agree with our fellow Muslims in something that does not contradict revelation—and may not contradict reason either—then the latter is preferable.”

The philosophers saw an opportunity to prevail over the various Muslim groups because of the innovations each group had introduced. They seized upon each group’s innovation and used it as an argument against them. Someone holding such an innovated position could therefore say:

“I would rather abandon this innovated position and agree with what the Quran, the Sunnah, and the statements of the early generations of the Muslim community indicate than agree with the philosophers on a position that I know constitutes disbelief according to revelation, and whose falsity reason also demonstrates.”

“As for the early generations and the imams,” none of them is reported to have held that the Quran is created; nor that it is a single meaning subsisting in His essence, which is at once command, prohibition, and statement, and which is what the Torah, the Gospel, the Quran, and other verbal expressions signify; nor that it consists of eternal, beginningless sounds unrelated to His will and power; nor that Allah did not speak until He brought speech into being for Himself, thereby becoming one who speaks.

As for the claim that people’s voices when reciting the Quran, or their utterances, are eternal and beginningless, this too is among the “newly introduced innovations” whose falsity is more evident than that of others. The early generations and the imams are among those furthest removed from this position. Sound reason recognizes that the claim that people’s voices are eternal and beginningless is self-evidently false.