“Does Allah’s speech consist of letters and sound, or not?”

Giving an unqualified answer to this question, whether negative or affirmative, is an error. This question is among the newly devised innovations that arose after the third century AH, when some speculative theologians who affirmed the divine attributes said:

“Allah’s speech—what He revealed to His prophets, such as the Torah, the Gospel, and the Quran; what He did not reveal; the words by which He brought created things into being; and the words containing His commands, prohibitions, and reports—is nothing more than a single meaning, constituting one attribute subsisting in Allah. If expressed in Hebrew, it is the Torah; if expressed in Arabic, it is the Quran. Command, prohibition, and report are descriptions of this attribute, not subdivisions of it. The letters of the Quran are created: Allah created them but did not speak them, and they are not part of His speech, for His speech does not consist of letters and sound.”

Others who affirmed the divine attributes opposed them, saying:

“Rather, the Quran consists of letters and sounds.”

Some mistakenly supposed that by ‘letters’ they meant ink, and by ‘sounds’ they meant the voices of human beings. No scholar, however, has said this.

The correct position held by the early generations of the Muslim community—including Imam Ahmad, al-Bukhārī, the compiler of the Sahīh, in his Book of the Creation of Human Actions and elsewhere, and all the imams before and after them—is adherence to the established texts and the consensus of the early generations of the Muslim community. That position is