and claim to follow his position. Neither group understood the subtlety of Ahmad’s words—may Allah be pleased with him.
Another group—including Abū al-Hasan al-Ashʿarī, al-Qādī Abū Bakr ibn al-Tayyib, al-Qādī Abū Yaʿlā, and others who say that they hold the creed of Ahmad ibn Hanbal and the imams of Sunnah and hadith—said: “Ahmad and others disliked the expression ‘my utterance of the Quran,’ because lafz means throwing away and casting aside.”
Yet another group—including Abū Muhammad ibn Hazm and others who likewise say that they follow Ahmad ibn Hanbal and the other imams of the Sunnah—together with still others who affiliate themselves with the Sunnah and the school of hadith, claim to hold the creed of Ahmad ibn Hanbal and other such adherents of the Sunnah. Yet they have not understood what the imams of the Sunnah, such as Ahmad ibn Hanbal and others like him, actually taught. We have explained the statements of the early generations and the imams, including Ahmad ibn Hanbal and others, at length elsewhere.
As for al-Bukhārī and those like him, they are among the people most knowledgeable about the positions of Ahmad ibn Hanbal and the other imams of the Sunnah. I have seen a group who affiliate themselves with the Sunnah and hadith—such as Abū Nasr al-Sijzī and others like him who refute Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Bukhārī—say that Ahmad ibn Hanbal used to declare: “My utterance of the Quran is uncreated.” They cited reports whose falsity is beyond doubt.
[The mass-transmitted reports from Ahmad ibn Hanbal, related by his two sons, Sālih and ʿAbd Allāh, and by Hanbal, al-Marwadhī, Qawzān, and others whose number Allah alone knows, make clear that Ahmad used to condemn both groups.]
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Abū Bakr al-Marwadhī composed a work on this subject in which he recorded the statement of