the truth on which all creation agrees.”

Thus, the claim that there is nothing but the meaning subsisting in His Essence or these letters and sounds is false. He is then asked: “Are those letters and sounds part of the speech that Allah Himself spoke, or are they created things that He created in something other than Himself?”

If you say, “They are part of Allah’s speech,” you must accept what you were trying to evade, since you have acknowledged that Allah has speech consisting of letters and sounds, as the majority of Muslims affirm. If you say, “They are not Allah’s speech,” then the same applies all the more to these. This Quran would therefore not be Allah’s speech—a conclusion whose falsehood is necessarily known in the religion of Islam.

As for his statement, “Whoever says, ‘My utterance is the very speech of Allah,’ has cast off the bonds of reason and drowned in a sea of blindness and ignorance,” the response is:

The statement, “My utterance is the very speech of Allah,” is ambiguous. Lafz (utterance) is originally the verbal noun of lafaza–yalfizu (to utter), just as tilāwah and qirā’ah (recitation) are originally the verbal nouns of talā–yatlū and qara’a–yaqra’u (to recite). Yet the terms “utterance” and “recitation” are also used to refer to the actual speech uttered or recited.

When people say, “An utterance indicates a meaning,” they do not mean the act of uttering, but rather what is uttered. Likewise, when they say to someone whom they have heard speaking, “These are fine expressions,” they mean what he utters. As Allah Most High says: “He utters no