These two foolish innovations sparked turmoil and intensified animosity, although the adherents of both positions may explain them in ways that confuse many people. For example, someone who maintained that the sound heard from a person, or part of it, is eternal explained this by saying that the eternal had manifested in what was brought into being, without dwelling within it.

As for “human actions,” I have seen a later writer claim that they are eternal, both good and evil. He explained this by saying that divine legislation is eternal and divine decree is eternal, and that these actions are governed by that legislation and decree. He did not distinguish between divine legislation, which is Allah’s speech, and what it governs, namely what is commanded or forbidden. Nor did he distinguish between divine decree, which is Allah’s knowledge and speech, and the things decreed, which are His creations.

All rational people know as a self-evident truth that commands and statements are two kinds of speech, in both its wording and its meaning. Commands and statements are not attributes of a single subject. Whoever makes commands, prohibitions, and statements attributes of speech rather than kinds of speech contradicts what reason knows necessarily.

In this respect, these people are like someone who claims that existence is one, failing to distinguish between unity in kind and identity as a single entity. For the division of “what exists” into the eternal and the originated, the necessary and the contingent, the Creator and the created, and what subsists by itself and what subsists in another is like the division of “speech” into commands and statements, or into non-declarative and declarative speech, or into commands, prohibitions, and statements. Whoever says that speech is a single meaning that is both command and statement is like someone who says that existence is one and is both the Creator and the created, or both the necessary and the contingent. Just as the true import of this position amounts to denying the Creator, so the true import of