his execution; so Khālid ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Qasrī, the governor of Iraq, offered him as a sacrifice at Wāsit. He said, “O people, offer your sacrifices—may Allah accept them from you. I am sacrificing al-Ja‘d ibn Dirham, for he has claimed that Allah did not take Abraham as a close friend and did not speak directly to Moses. Exalted is Allah, far above what al-Ja‘d says!” Then he stepped down and slaughtered him.

Al-Jahm ibn Safwān adopted this doctrine from him and denied that Allah speaks. Then, acting hypocritically toward the Muslims, he acknowledged the term “speech,” saying, “His speech is created in a medium such as air or the leaves of trees.” Some practitioners of speculative theology and disputation who professed Islam, among the Mu‘tazilites and others, adopted aspects of the doctrines of the Sabaeans and polytheists, following al-Ja‘d and al-Jahm.

This began with the Sabaeans holding two views concerning “creation.” Some maintain that the heavens were created after not having existed, as the messengers and the Books of Allah Most High have declared. Others introduced an innovation, saying instead that the heavens are eternal, without beginning, and have always existed by virtue of the existence of the First, whose existence is necessary in itself. Some of them may deny the Maker altogether. Their doctrines concerning creation and resurrection, the beginning and the final return, are highly contradictory, because they did not hold fast to the rope of Allah Most High, which would unite them. Conjectures cannot unite people on matters such as these, whose realities human judgment cannot grasp except through revelation from Allah Most High. Their debates with one another rely only on inferences whose premises are drawn from natural phenomena of the lower world and the natural powers present in earth, water, and air