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His words, “In the name of your Lord who created,” and His words, “Who taught by the pen,” “taught man what he did not know,” establish His actions and His speech. Creation is His action, and teaching includes teaching what He has revealed, as He says:

“The Most Merciful taught the Quran, created man, and taught him articulate speech.”

His words, “by the pen,” include teaching His speech, which is written with the pen. The fact that this was revealed in the opening of the surah in which He sent down His speech and taught His Prophet His speech, which is written with the pen, shows that the verse encompasses this. For the occasion prompting unrestricted and general wording must necessarily fall within its scope.

If, then, this indicates that He created and spoke—and He has said, “He created man”—it is known both through reason and through the wording that the created human being is distinct from the Lord’s act of creating him. The same applies to His creation of anything else. Those who disputed this did so only because of a misconception that occurred to them, as discussed later and elsewhere. Otherwise, they do not dispute that khalaqa (“he created”) is a verb with a verbal noun, as in: khalaqa (“he created”), yakhluqu (“he creates”), khalqan (“creation”). The human being is the object of the action denoted by the verbal noun—the “created being”—not the action itself.