Allāh Muhammad ibn Taymiyyah. When they saw those views, they said, “This is consistent only with the position of the Mu‘tazilah.”

This same Abū Abd Allāh ibn Abd al-Wahhāb once visited our shaykh Abū Zakariyyā ibn al-Sayrafī while the latter was ill. Abū Zakariyyā offered a supplication transmitted from Imam Ahmad, which included these words:

“I ask You—by Your power through which You were able to say to the heavens and the earth, ‘Come, willingly or unwillingly,’ and they said, ‘We come willingly’—to do such and such for us.”

When the people had left, he said to him, “What is this supplication you have offered? This is consistent only with the position of the Mu‘tazilah, who say that the Quran is created. As for Ahl al-Sunnah, according to them, it is not said that He was able to speak or say something, for His speech is eternal, inseparable from His essence, and unconnected to His will and power.”

Abū Abd Allāh ibn Abd al-Wahhāb—may Allah have mercy on him—had derived this from the discussions presented by Abū al-Hasan ibn al-Zāghūnī and others like him; before him, by Abū al-Wafā’ ibn ‘Aqīl and others like him; and before them both, by al-Qādī Abū Ya‘lā and others of his kind. These men, their counterparts among the followers of Mālik and al-Shāfi‘ī—such as Abū al-Walīd al-Bājī and Abū al-Ma‘ālī al-Juwaynī—and a group of Abū Hanīfah’s followers agree with Ibn Kullāb’s assertion that Allah does not speak by His will and power, and with his assertion that the Quran is inseparable from Allah’s essence. Indeed, they suppose that this is the position of the early generations—the position of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Mālik, al-Shāfi‘ī, and all the other early scholars—who say that the Quran is uncreated. This goes so far that those among them who followed the path of the Sālimiyyah—such as al-Qādī, Ibn ‘Aqīl, and Ibn