by intentions are actions judged, and each person shall have only what he intended,” or:

“Whoever possesses three qualities will find the sweetness of faith: that Allah and His Messenger are dearer to him than anything else; that he loves a person only for Allah’s sake; and that he hates to return to disbelief after Allah has saved him from it just as he hates to be cast into the Fire,”

or his saying:

“Whoever deliberately lies about me, let him take his seat in the Fire,”

they say, “This is the speech of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace; this is his hadith, and this is his saying.” Yet they know that all the individual words of this speech already existed in the speech of the Arabs before him, such as “only,” “actions,” “intention,” “intentions,” “each person,” “what he intended,” and so forth.

The same applies to the speech of the Companions and their successors, and to the authors of books, epistles, and sermons. Everyone says, “This epistle is the speech of so-and-so,” “This sermon is the speech of so-and-so,” and “This discussion is part of the speech of so-and-so,” even though they know that the individual elements of speech—its words and letters of the alphabet—predate him.

This is because speech does not constitute speech by virtue of its individual words, nor by virtue of their constituent parts—the letters of the alphabet. Nor is the purpose of assigning words to meanings to convey isolated concepts. For one can know that a word has been assigned to an isolated concept only after knowing that concept. If knowledge of the concept could be acquired only through the word, this would entail circularity. For this reason, the scholars of Arabic—who are more knowledgeable about resemblances between expressions than