passage. These people claimed that their arguments established that the world came into existence, yet they neither championed Islam nor defeated its enemies.

The “third position” is that of those who say that He speaks independently of His will and power, with speech that subsists in His essence eternally, without beginning or end. They agree with the preceding group on the fundamental premise of their position, but say that attributes subsist in the Lord, whereas attributes exercised by choice, which relate to His will and power, do not subsist in Him. The first person within Islam widely known to have expressed this position was Abdullāh ibn Sa‘īd ibn Kullāb.

His followers then differed. Some said: That speech is a single meaning: it is the command to do everything commanded, the prohibition of everything forbidden, and the statement concerning everything spoken of. If expressed in Arabic, it is the Quran; if expressed in Hebrew, it is the Torah. They said that the meaning of the Quran, the Torah, and the Gospel is one, and that the meaning of the Verse of the Throne is the meaning of the verse on debt.

They also said: Commands, prohibitions, and statements are attributes of speech, not categories of it. Some of their more exacting thinkers reduced that meaning to declarative speech, and declarative speech to knowledge.

The majority of rational people say: The unsoundness of this position is self-evident. Those who hold it say that His speaking to Moses consists only in creating a perception through which Moses understands that meaning.

They were therefore asked: Did he understand all of the speech, or only some of it? If he understood all of it,