and that Allah’s speech is nothing but a meaning subsisting in His essence, comprising command, prohibition, and report. This claim is invalid according to sound reason and authentic transmitted evidence. A single meaning cannot constitute the command to perform every commanded act and the report from every informant; nor can the Torah, the Gospel, and the Quran have one and the same meaning. They say: “When that speech is expressed in Arabic, it becomes the Quran, and when expressed in Hebrew, it becomes the Torah.” This is mistaken: the Torah can be expressed in Arabic, yet its meanings are not those of the Quran; and the Quran can be expressed in Hebrew, yet its meanings are not those of the Torah.

The first to introduce this position was Ibn Kullāb. Nevertheless, he and those who followed him in it, such as al-Ashʿarī and others, also say: “The Quran is truly preserved in hearts, truly recited by tongues, and truly written in the codices.”

Some of them illustrate this by saying that it is preserved in hearts just as Allah is known in hearts, recited by tongues just as Allah is mentioned by tongues, and written in the codices just as Allah is written in the codices. This is a mistaken account of the actual position of Ibn Kullāb and al-Ashʿarī. In their view, the Quran is a meaning expressed in words, and realities have four levels of existence: existence in external reality, in knowledge, in speech, and in writing. Thus, knowledge of the meaning does not occupy the second level, nor is its presence in a book like the presence of concrete entities in a book. These people have therefore made the position of Ibn Kullāb and al-Ashʿarī even more repugnant.