What exposes the Muʿtazilah’s deception is to say to them:

The unjust or just person, as people understand these terms, does indeed commit injustice or act justly; yet he also incurs sin thereby. People do not know anyone who is called unjust without the act by which he became unjust subsisting in him. Rather, they recognize as unjust only someone in whom the act he performed—and by which he became unjust—subsists, even if his act concerns someone else and produces an effect separate from him. They recognize someone as unjust only when that act subsists in him. Thus, when you define an unjust person as someone who commits injustice, but mean someone who produces it in another, this is deception and a corruption of revealed law, reason, and language.

You have done the same with the designation “speaker,” saying that it means someone who produces speech, even in another. You have deemed someone who brings into being speech separate from himself, subsisting in another, to be a speaker, even though no speech whatsoever subsists in him. This is among the gravest forms of falsehood, Qarmatianism, and sophistry.

For this reason, the early generations confronted them with the implications concerning the speech He brought into being in inanimate objects, and likewise what He created in animals. On this view, no distinction is made between speaking and causing another to speak. Yet the skins only said:

“Allah, who has made everything speak, has made us speak.”

They did not say that Allah Himself spoke those words. Hence some of the early generations, such as Sulaymān ibn Dāwūd al-Hāshimī and others, said, in substance, that on this view the speech created in Pharaoh, such that he said:

“I am your lord most high,”

would be like the speech created in the tree, such that it said:

“Indeed, I am Allah; there is no deity except Me.”

Thus, either Pharaoh was speaking the truth, or