is the reciter’s voice, while the speech is the Creator’s speech. Many who engage in this question fail to distinguish between the servant’s voice and the Lord’s voice. Rather, they identify the two, and so either deny both or affirm both.

Thus, when someone denies letters and sound, he denies that the Arabic Quran is Allah’s speech, that He calls His servants in His own voice, and that the Quran Muslims recite is Allah’s speech—just as he denies that the servant’s voice is an attribute of Allah, Mighty and Majestic. He then makes Allah’s varied speech a single thing, with no distinction between the eternal and that which has come into being. He is correct in this distinction, but not in that second point, which involves a form of deviation and negation of the divine attributes: he makes varied speech a single thing that, upon examination, has no reality.

If the identification of the Lord’s voice with the servant’s voice is affirmed, or someone refrains from distinguishing between them while maintaining that the letters occur successively, coexist in the Essence, and are individually eternal and beginningless, then he has made the Lord’s very attribute dwell within the servant or unite with the servant’s attribute. He has thus espoused a form of indwelling and union that leads to a form of negation of the divine attributes.

It is well known that failing to distinguish and maintain the separation between the Creator and His attributes, on the one hand, and the creature and its attributes, on the other, is error and misguidance. None of the early generations of this community or its imams held such a view. Rather, they unanimously distinguish between the Lord’s voice and the servant’s voice, and unanimously affirm that Allah spoke the Quran that He revealed to His Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—with its letters and meanings