As for those who maintain that a particular instance of speech is beginningless—whether it consists of a meaning, letters, or sounds—they say that Allah created in Moses a faculty of perception by which he perceived that beginningless speech. In any case, a speaker’s speech, when heard from someone conveying it on his behalf, is not what subsists in the original speaker himself. How, then, could this not also apply to the speech of Allah Most High?

In examining “the question of divine speech,” one must therefore carefully consider two fundamental points. The first concerns Allah’s speaking the Quran and other speech: did He speak it by His will and power or not? And did He speak with speech subsisting in His own essence, or did He create it in something else? The second concerns the transmission of that speech from Allah: it is not an attribute of the person transmitting it, even though the purpose of transmission is to convey that speech. A detailed discussion of this belongs elsewhere.

Furthermore, when one of these two disputants says, “They are beginningless and have no beginning, while their vowel marks and dots came into being,” and the other says, “They are not Allah’s speech; they are created, together with their vowel marks and dots,” this may be understood to mean that by “letters” they intended written letters rather than spoken ones.

People have disputed the vowel marks and dots of written letters. When the Companions wrote out the copies of the Quran, they wrote them without vowel marks or dots, because their reliance regarding the Quran was on what they had memorized in their hearts, not on written copies. It is transmitted through mass transmission and preserved in people’s hearts. Even if the written copies ceased to exist, Muslims would have no need of them. Muslims are not like the People of the Book, who rely on books susceptible to alteration. Allah sent down the Quran to Muhammad, who received it and memorized it in his heart; He did not send it down in writing as He did the Torah