a contextual indication may make it refer sometimes to one and sometimes to the other. Their disagreement over what “speech” denotes thus resembles their disagreement over what “one who speaks” denotes.

If someone gives the names Muhammad and Abraham and says, “Muhammad has come, and Abraham has come,” these are not the Muhammad and Abraham mentioned in the Quran. If, however, he says, “Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and Abraham is Allah’s close friend,” meaning the Seal of the Messengers and the close friend of the Most Merciful, then he has uttered the names of the Muhammad and Abraham mentioned in the Quran. Yet he has used these names to compose a statement of his own, so it is his speech; he has not uttered them as part of the Arabic Quran which Allah spoke.

This is further clarified by what the jurists have stated concerning the etiquette of relieving oneself: one should not take along anything bearing a mention of Allah. They cited as evidence the hadith in the Sunan collections:

“When the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, entered the privy, he would remove his ring. His ring was inscribed with ‘Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.’”

“Muhammad” occupied one line, “Messenger” another, and “Allah” another. Yet no scholar has prohibited taking along material containing human speech and letters of the alphabet, such as the accounting sheets on which administrative clerks record accounts, the papers on which merchants record what they sell, and similar things.

The Prophet’s biography also relates:

“When the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, made a peace agreement with Ghatafān in return for half the dates of Medina, Saʿd came to him and asked, ‘Is this something Allah has commanded—in which case we hear and obey—or something you are doing for our benefit?’ The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, explained to him that he had not done this on the basis of revelation, but through his own judgment. Saʿd then said, ‘We were indeed living in the days of pre-Islamic ignorance