are components of speech, are present in the Quran; indeed, all of them occur together in two verses: the first in Āl ʿImrān and the second in Sūrat al-Fath—the verse beginning “Then, after the distress, He sent down upon you,” and the verse beginning “Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”

That being so, someone who utters other speech composed of the letters of the alphabet has not pronounced the very same letters that occur in the wording of the Quran, but only letters like them. What he utters may be something he has taken from the wording of Allah Most High’s speech, if that was his starting point, or it may not actually be so.

It is said: A letter, considered in itself, is a single thing. Its absolute reality, involving no combination, exists neither in the speech of Allah Most High nor in the speech of His servants. What exists is only a letter forming part of an expression, or its name when a letter occurs on its own. Yet this universal—even in the case of entities that exist independently in external reality, such as human beings—does not exist among concrete entities apart from its particular instances. It exists apart from particular instances only in the mind, not in external reality. How much more, then, does this apply to a letter, which exists externally only in combination! Even supposing that it existed externally without combination, in multiple individual instances, as human beings do, its absolute reality, considered in itself, would exist only in minds, not in concrete entities.

Thus it becomes clear that the rulings governing letters vary according to their meanings and according to the speaker