Quran: ‘Glory be to Allah; praise be to Allah; there is no deity worthy of worship except Allah; and Allah is the Greatest.’” Reported by Muslim.

Allah Most High says:

“To Him good words ascend, and righteous deeds raise them.”

Examples of this are numerous.

In short, wherever Allah mentions in His Book that any of His creatures—whether prophets, their followers, or those who denied them—“said,” “say,” or that something is “their saying,” or uses similar expressions, He means the meaning together with the spoken wording. The terms “saying,” “speech,” and the like, together with their derivatives—past- and present-tense verbs, imperatives, verbal nouns, and active participles—are known in the Quran, the Sunnah, and all other Arabic discourse only as referring to both wording and meaning. The same applies to the various kinds of speech, such as affirmation, denial, commands, prohibitions, and so forth. No one can deny this, for the examples are too numerous to count.

There was no dispute over what “speech” denotes among the Companions, those who followed them in righteousness, or the generation after them, whether among the adherents of the Sunnah or the adherents of innovation. Rather, the first person known in Islam to have maintained that speech denotes meaning alone was ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sa‘īd ibn Kilāb, who lived much later—at the time of Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s ordeal. Both the scholars of the Sunnah and the scholars of innovation rejected this view of his.

It is therefore inconceivable that none of the Companions, their followers, or the generation after them should have understood what speech means—though it is the most evident characteristic of the children of Adam, as Allah Most High says, “So by the Lord of heaven and earth, it is indeed true, as surely as you speak,” and the word has countless uses—until someone came along and advanced a view about it that no Muslim or anyone else had ever expressed before him.

If they say: Allah Most High has said, “And they say within themselves,” and, “And remember your Lord within yourself, humbly and fearfully,” and other such passages.