created? On this there are two views among Ahl al-Sunnah.

As for someone who utters another person’s speech intending to convey and deliver it, or to speak it while believing that he intends only to utter that other person’s speech—the person whose commands and statements these are, and who originally spoke its letters and meanings—then the speech is unquestionably that of the first speaker. It is not the second speaker’s speech in any respect; it has merely reached people through him.

Speech has no counterpart resembling it in every respect to which it can be assimilated. Rather, it is intelligible in its own right. For example, even if Zayd, a created being, has ceased to exist, and the attribute that subsisted in him has also ceased to exist, when another narrator relates his speech and we say:

“This is Zayd’s speech,”

we are referring to the reality that Zayd originated and that was an attribute of his. This is that very same reality—I mean the formal reality, not the matter. For sound as such, in relation to distinct articulated letters, stands in the relation of matter to form. It was not the first speaker’s speech because of sound as such, which is shared by the sounds of human beings, speechless animals, and inanimate objects. Rather, it was his speech because of the form that Zayd composed, together with his composition of its meanings. The existence of this form in the two instances of matter is not like the existence of species and individuals in concrete entities, nor like the existence of accidents in substances, nor