They do not mean that this is his actual voice and movements. No rational person says this, nor would it initially occur to any rational person. Yet following conjecture and personal desires drives those who do so into “Qarmatianism” in matters of revelation and “sophistry” in matters of reason. Were people left with their natural disposition, it would remain sound and intact.

When people encounter sound speech—whether someone has spoken it and it has been heard from him and transmitted, or he has written it in a book—no rational person says that the very meanings within the speaker’s heart and the words uttered by his tongue have left him and passed to the listener and the person conveying his speech, or that they have left him and come to reside in the paper. Nor does anyone say that the very meanings and words that subsist in him are the ink on the paper. Nor does anyone even say that his actual utterances, which are his sounds, are the sounds made by the person conveying his speech.

All of this is clear: no rational person makes such claims about a created being’s speech when it is heard and conveyed or written in a book. How, then, could this be said of Allah’s speech, which has been heard from Him and conveyed from Him, or which He, glory be to Him, has written—as He wrote the Torah for Moses and wrote the Quran in the Preserved Tablet, and as Muslims have written it in their copies of the Quran?

And if someone hears a created being’s speech and conveys its wording and meaning—even the poetry of a created being, as the poetry of Hassān, Ibn Rawāhah, Labīd, and other such poets is conveyed—and people say, “These are Hassān’s very verses; this is Hassān’s own poetry,” and, “These are Labīd’s very verses,” as in his words: