and the many other books of this kind. None of them has been reported to hold a contrary position, except that some people with ulterior motives attributed such a statement to al-Bukhārī.

Yet it is established through a reliable chain of transmission that he said:

“Whoever claims that I said, ‘My utterance of the Quran is created,’ has lied.”

The chapter headings towards the end of his Sahīh make this clear.

There are three matters here:

First: The letters of the Quran, which constitute its wording, before Gabriel brought them down and after he brought them down. Whoever says that these are created has contradicted the consensus of the early generations. In their time, no one said this except those who said that the Quran was created. Those people held that its words—the words of the Quran—were created. As for anything beyond that, they do not acknowledge its existence, whether created or uncreated.

More than one leading scholar of dialectical theology has acknowledged this. Among them was ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī, with his extensive knowledge of religions and sects. He stated that the early generations, without qualification, held that the letters of the Quran are uncreated. He said, “The emergence of the view that the Quran originated in time was a later development.” He also expounded the position of the early generations in his book entitled Nihāyat al-Kalām (The Culmination of Dialectical Theology).

Second: The actions of people, namely the movements through which their recitation is expressed. There is no disagreement among the early generations that people’s actions are created. Hence it was said that the charge of innovation was levelled