have always spoken by His will and power, because that would entail temporal occurrences without a beginning.” This is their foundational premise.
They were answered:
“It is well known that speech is an attribute of perfection, not deficiency, and that one who speaks by his will and power is more perfect than one who is unable to do so. Accordingly, one who has always spoken by his will is more perfect than one who became able to speak after having been unable to do so.”
They were also told:
“If you say that He spoke after speech had been impossible for Him, without any cause bringing about His ability to speak or making speech possible for Him, then you are saying that He had always been unable to speak, and speech had always been impossible for Him, but then He became able to speak by His will without anything having occurred. This contradicts plain reason, denies the Creator the attributes of perfection, and makes Him like a created being who became able to speak after having been unable to do so.”
The early generations and the leading scholars explicitly stated that the Lord, Most High, has always spoken whenever He wills and however He wills. This was expressly stated by ‘Abd Allāh ibn al-Mubārak, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and other leading religious scholars and early Muslims. These are the very people who affirmed that the Quran is the speech of Allah, sent down and uncreated. None of them said that He does not speak by His will and power. Nor did any of them say that it is created and separate