One of the greatest causes of error in understanding the speech of Allah and His Messenger is that a person grows accustomed to a later terminology, then seeks to interpret Allah’s speech according to that terminology and the usage with which he is familiar.

Regarding what is meant by kalām (speech), Sībawayh reports Arab usage in his book, saying:

“Know that anna (‘that’) occurs in Arab speech only in quotation, and what is quoted after ‘saying’ is speech—an utterance.”

Otherwise, in Arab usage, the terms kalām and kalima (word) are never used except for a complete sentence. The term harf is used for a noun, a verb, a meaningful particle, and the name of an alphabetic letter.

Thus al-Khalīl asked his companions, “How do you pronounce the zāy in Zayd?”

They answered, “Zāy.”

He said, “You have pronounced its name; the letter itself is zh.”

Al-Khalīl thus explained that these expressions called the letters of the alphabet are names. In the speech of earlier scholars, one frequently finds the expression, “This is a harf belonging to the uncommon vocabulary,” by which they mean a complete noun.

The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, illustrated his words, “He will be rewarded for every harf,” by saying:

“But alif is a harf, lām is a harf, and mīm is a harf.”

On the same basis, dhālika (‘that’) is a harf, al-kitāb (‘the Book’) is a harf, and so forth. It has also been said that dhālika consists of several harfs, as does al-kitāb; an explicit explanation to this effect has been transmitted through some chains of narration.

The grammarians, however, adopted a special convention, using the term kalima to mean