an expression does not resemble what it expresses, unlike a reproduction and its original. This involves additional innovations not found in the position of the “Lafziyyah” among the people of hadith, whom the imams of the Sunnah denounced and called “Jahmiyyah.” For these people hold that the letters originated with the Messenger and are in no way among the words Allah spoke. They also say that Allah has no speech on earth.
Likewise, none of the early “Lafziyyah” who said, “Our utterance of the Quran is uncreated,” maintained that a servant’s voice is uncreated, that the eternal voice is heard from a servant, that this voice is Allah’s voice, or that Allah’s voice is heard alongside it. Only the extremists among them introduced this notion, just as the extremists of the other group introduced the claim that the letters of the Quran are not Allah’s speech. These two heinous “innovations” had not yet appeared among those deviants of the two groups whose views Imam Ahmad and others denounced. The latter extremists also held that the Quran is nothing more than a meaning subsisting within Him, and that Allah’s speech in the Torah, the Gospel, and the Quran all amounts to that meaning.
The “other” group recognized that the letters of the Quran are part of Allah’s speech, and that the Quran—both its letters and its meanings—is Allah’s speech. They recognized that a single meaning cannot be command, prohibition, statement, and inquiry, and that the Torah, the Gospel, and the Quran cannot all convey one and the same meaning. They knew that, if we translated the Torah into Arabic, its meaning would not become the meaning of the Quran, and that these claims are known to be false