“She is Syrian when she rises … and Suhayl, when he rises, is Yemeni.”

These are equivocal names: his wonder and objection arise from the apparent sense of the ambiguous wording. Their detailed arguments have been discussed at length elsewhere.

Those who deny the divine attributes based their position and their negations on the following argument: the world came into being because bodies came into being. They argue that bodies came into being because they are never free of newly occurring events and did not precede them; whatever is never free of such events and did not precede them must itself have come into being. Their position ultimately led them to that of Pharaoh, who denied the Creator and accused His Messenger Moses of lying when he said that Allah had spoken to him. This is the foundation of the doctrine of the Jahmiyyah, whom the early generations and the leading scholars unanimously condemned. It is also the foundation of the doctrine of the speculative theologians whom they unanimously condemned. Numerous works have been compiled recording the statements of the early generations and the leading scholars condemning the Jahmiyyah and these speculative theologians.

The early generations did not condemn speech as such, for every human being speaks. Nor did they condemn reasoning, reflection, or the disputation that Allah commanded His Messenger to engage in, nor reasoning based on what Allah and His Messenger have explained. Indeed, they did not condemn any discourse that was true. Rather, they condemned false discourse: that which contradicts the Quran and Sunnah and also contradicts reason. Thus, the discourse condemned by the early generations was false discourse, which conflicts with both revelation and reason.