know that the sound heard from Labīd is not the same sound heard from the reciter. Yet what the sound is intended to convey is the speech itself, for sound is a means of conveying it. Thus, whatever merits praise or blame in the voice belongs to the person conveying the speech, while whatever merits praise or blame in the speech—in its wording, composition and meaning—belongs to the speaker whose words are being conveyed.

Once this is understood, someone may ask: “Is this Quran which we recite, and which subsists in us during recitation, the speech of Allah that subsisted in Him when He spoke it and was an attribute of His, or not?”

He should be told:

“As for the speech, it is Allah’s speech, not ours or anyone else’s. It is heard from the person conveying it, not from Allah—as explained earlier. It is heard through an intermediary, constituting hearing in a qualified sense, not unqualified hearing from Allah—as explained earlier. Nothing that subsists in His Essence has departed from Him and passed to us, nor does anything peculiar to our own beings—such as our movements and voices, which proceed from us—subsist in Him.”

As for his question, “Is this Quran which we recite, and which subsists in us during recitation, the speech of Allah that subsisted in Him when He spoke it?”, the term “subsisting” is ambiguous here. If he means that the Lord’s own attribute becomes an attribute of someone else, or that the servant’s attribute becomes an attribute of the Lord, that is not so. If he means that what is uncreated has itself become created, or that what is created has become uncreated, that is not so. If he means that someone else shares with the Lord that which subsists exclusively in Him, that is not so. And if