with a sound subsisting in something other than Him, while the meaning is eternal and subsists in Him.”

When the Ash‘arīs—such as al-Qādī Abū Bakr ibn al-Bāqillānī and others in the late fourth century AH—publicly advanced the view that speech is neither letters nor sound nor language, they were followed by a number of jurists from the schools of Mālik, al-Shāfi‘ī, and Abū Hanīfah, and a few from the school of Ahmad. The scholars of hadith and the majority of Sunnis among the jurists and hadith scholars recognized the religious innovation this entailed. They therefore publicly affirmed the contrary, and some of them stated without qualification that Allah’s speech is letters and sound. . . (1).