Allah’s verses and names, to the point that they deviated concerning His names and verses.

Similarly, the former group’s unqualified assertion that the Quran has no reality other than letters and sounds, their failure to distinguish between Allah’s voice heard from Him and the reciter’s voice, and their assertion that the Quran is eternal led the ignorant among them, and those who lied about them, to report that they held that people’s voices and the ink in the written copy of the Quran are eternal, and that the letters constituting Allah’s speech are the ink itself. Yet they did not say this; rather, they rejected it, just as Allah distinguished words from ink in His saying:

“Say, ‘If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord, the sea would be exhausted before the words of my Lord were exhausted, even if We brought its like as a supplement.’”

These people made “two errors”: an error concerning their own doctrine and an error concerning the revealed law. As for the error in their “representation of their doctrine,” they should have said that the Quran is in the written copy just as knowledge and meanings are on paper. Just as one says, “Knowledge is in this book,” one says, “Speech is in this book.” For, in their view, speech is the meaning subsisting in the essence. Its analogue should therefore be knowledge subsisting in the essence, not the essence itself.

As for the error concerning “the revealed law,” they should be told: The Quran is in written copies just as Allah’s name is in written copies. For the Quran is speech: it is preserved in hearts just as speech is preserved in hearts, and it is mentioned by tongues just as mention is made of