people’s efforts to understand and discuss it, and despite the mass-transmitted texts of the Book and the Sunnah and reports from the Companions that contradict this view.

The Book, the Sunnah, and the reports from the early generations contradict every one of these views. Moreover, the majority of rational people who understand these views agree that their falsity is self-evident to reason. A group of rational people may agree upon a statement whose falsity is self-evident to reason if this results from prior agreement, just as they may conspire to agree upon a lie. Without such agreement, however, this is not possible. Thus, a doctrine that people have adopted from one another—such as the doctrines of the Christians, the Rāfidah, the Jahmiyyah, the Dahriyyah, and others—may contain something whose falsity is self-evident to reason, even though a group of rational people have affirmed it in this manner. But for them to affirm it independently, without prior agreement, does not occur. Most people who unquestioningly adopt false views do not conceive of them fully; a full conception of them would necessarily reveal their falsity. Then, when a view becomes widespread among a group who know of no other view attributed to Ahl al-Sunnah, they assume that it is the position of Ahl al-Sunnah.

Since it is widely known among Muslims that Ahl al-Sunnah do not say that the Quran is created, anyone who sees a group rejecting the claim that the Quran is created comes to suppose that everything that group says on this subject is the position of the early generations and the leading scholars of the Sunnah—and those who said that the Quran is uncreated, but rather subsists in Allah’s essence, and agreed with