created by Allah, and claimed that man originates or creates them independently of Allah. The early generations and the imams therefore explained that Allah is the Creator of everything, including human actions and all else.
Later, a group of those who identified themselves with the Sunnah proclaimed that people’s utterances of the Quran were uncreated. Imam Ahmad rejected this and declared anyone who said it an innovator. After his death, his companion Abū Bakr al-Marwadhī took up the matter and composed a work on it, which Abū Bakr al-Khallāl mentioned in his Book of the Sunnah. He also mentioned the case of Abū Tālib, whom Ahmad rebuked for saying, “My utterance of the Quran is uncreated.” The Jahmiyyah were the first to say, “Utterance of the Quran is created.” This was transmitted from Ahmad by his two sons, Sālih and ‘Abd Allāh, his cousin Hanbal, al-Marwadhī, Qūrān, and other eminent companions of his.
The leading scholars among Ahmad’s companions and other scholars of the Sunnah condemned those who said that people’s voices and actions were uncreated. Al-Bukhārī composed a work on this subject. Likewise, they declared those who said that Allah does not speak with a voice, that the letters of the Quran are created, or that utterance of the Quran is created, to be innovators and adherents of the Jahmiyyah. The imams thus refuted this innovation, as we have explained at length elsewhere.
No one—not any of Ahmad’s well-known companions, nor any other recognized scholar—ever said that human actions are eternal. I have encountered this view only among certain later scholars in non-Arab lands and in Egypt who affiliated themselves with the school of al-Shāfi‘ī or Ahmad. I have seen some Egyptians say: