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With the principle underlying people’s disagreement over the question of Allah’s speech now established, those who held without qualification that whatever does not precede temporal events is itself temporal disagreed over Allah’s speech.

Many of them said: “Speech occurs only through the speaker’s will and power, and is therefore temporal, like other temporal events.” Then one group said: “Temporal events do not subsist in the Lord, so speech must be created in something other than Him.” Thus they made His speech one created thing among others, drawing no distinction between “He spoke” and “He acted.”

Yet it is known that created things are not attributes of the Creator. He is not characterized by the colours, sounds, smells, movement, knowledge, power, hearing, or sight that He creates in others. How, then, could He be characterized by speech that He creates in others? If that were possible, whatever He creates by causing inanimate objects to speak would be His speech. Anyone who knows that He creates His servants’ speech and actions would then be obliged to say that every utterance in existence is His speech, as one of the Ittihādiyya said:

“Every utterance in existence is His speech;
Prose or verse—it is all the same to us.”

This is the position of the Jahmiyya, the Najjāriyya, the Dirāriyya, and others, for these groups