He, the Exalted, says:

“Say, ‘If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord, the sea would be exhausted before the words of my Lord were exhausted, even if We brought another like it to replenish it.’”

If you say, “He heard part of it,” then it is divisible, whereas according to you it is indivisible. Moreover, Allah distinguished between His speaking to Moses, blessings and peace be upon him, and His revealing to the other prophets. He also distinguished between revelation and speaking from behind a veil. If the meaning were one and the same, all of this would be revelation, and there would be no distinct speaking beyond that. Nor is it impossible for the Lord Most High to call out to someone, since a meaning subsisting within the self does not constitute a call. Allah Most High has stated in several places in the Quran that He called out.

Accordingly, when any of these people says that no part of Allah’s speech is superior to another, what his position actually entails is that the question itself is impossible: there are not two things such that one could be said to equal the other or be superior to it. Equality and superiority are conceivable only between two or more things. They hold the same position concerning His will, knowledge, hearing, and sight. For anyone who regards an attribute as a single entity, it is impossible—on his own premises—to ask whether some parts of it are superior to others, since he holds that it has no parts.

The same applies to anyone who agrees with them that these attributes are each a single entity, yet says that Allah’s speech consists of letters that are individually beginningless, or of letters and sounds that are individually beginningless—whether he also says that they are the very sounds heard from reciters, or that they are some of the sounds heard from reciters—even though the falsity of this is self-evident,