and these are its attributes, not its divisions?

For these people say that the meanings of all Allah’s speech are a single meaning. Thus, the meaning of “May the hands of Abū Lahab perish” is the meaning of “Say: He is Allah, One,” and the meaning of the Torah is the meaning of the Quran and the Gospel. They may then reduce all the meanings of speech to assertion, and may identify the meaning of assertion with knowledge, while treating knowledge of one thing as distinct from knowledge of another.

For this reason, most rational people say that the falsity of this is self-evident. They say that command, prohibition, and assertion are relational attributes of speech, not its types and divisions. Allah’s speech is far greater than the speech of created beings. The speech contained in the written copy of the Quran belongs to this last category, not the preceding categories. How much more so, then, when that wording possesses such distinctive qualities that it is said of it:

“Say: If mankind and jinn gathered together to produce the like of this Quran, they could not produce its like, even if they helped one another.”

However, some things signify something else intentionally, while others signify something else without any intention on their part to do so, such as inanimate things: they serve purposes other than signifying the Creator. Other things are intended solely to signify, such that mentioning them for their intended purpose amounts to mentioning their referents—as with a name and that which it names. What is intended by a name is the thing named; hence, when the name is mentioned, the thing named is intended. The same applies to “wording” in relation to the meaning it signifies, and to “writing” in relation to wording. Thus, what is intended by writing