and the same entity, just as those others failed to distinguish between one individual instance of speech and speech of a single kind.

Those who deviated concerning speech ultimately arrived at this negation of the divine attributes, unbelief, and union professed by the proponents of monism, indwelling, and union between the Creator and created beings. Likewise, those who failed to distinguish between speech as a kind and its individual instances, and said that He speaks with beginningless letters and sound, initially maintained that He does not speak by His will and power, and that the letter bā does not precede the letter sīn. Rather, when He called to Moses and said:

“Indeed, I am Allah. There is no deity except Me, so worship Me.”

“Indeed, I am Allah, Lord of the worlds.”

the hamza, the nūn, and everything between them had existed together from all eternity, each simultaneous with the others, inseparable from the essence of Allah Most High, without beginning or end.

Then a group among them said that this beginningless speech is identical with the sounds heard from the reciters. Others said, rather, that two sounds are heard: one beginningless and the other originated. Some said that the shapes traced in ink are beginningless and eternal. Others said that the material bearing the ink is beginningless and eternal. It is also related that some of them said that the ink itself is beginningless and eternal.

Most of them use the term qadīm (beginningless) without understanding its meaning. Some think it means that it is beginningless in His knowledge; others think it means that it precedes something else; and others think that the word means uncreated. Still others make no distinctions in what they say. Thus these people became proponents of indwelling and union with respect to the attributes, and some of them affirm indwelling and union in