the tree was like Pharaoh.

Toward this meaning incline the unionists among the Jahmiyyah, who recite:

“All speech in existence is His speech;
To us, its prose and verse are all the same.”

This encompasses every form of disbelief. Thus, it is plainly evident to learned and ordinary people alike that anyone who says, “No speech whatsoever subsists in a speaker,” is in reality saying that he is not a speaker, for speech subsisting in someone is precisely what makes him a speaker. Hence their earliest adherents used to say:

“He is not a speaker.”

Then they said:

“He is a speaker in a figurative sense.”

This is because it is firmly established in people’s innate disposition that speech must subsist in a speaker, even if he also produces it, just as a person’s speech subsists in him while he acquires it. But to regard merely bringing speech into being in another as speech of one’s own is false.

The same applies to injustice. Grant that an unjust person is someone who commits injustice: this does not mean someone who brings it about in another while no act whatsoever subsists in him. Rather, an act must subsist in him, even if it affects someone else. This is one answer.

They may then be told:

Injustice involves a relation and an attribution. It is injustice on the part of the wrongdoer in the sense that it is aggression and oppression proceeding from him; and it is injustice against the wronged person in the sense that it is oppression and aggression directed against him. But someone against whom it constitutes no aggression, and from whom it constitutes no aggression against another, has no such relation to that injustice: it is neither injustice committed by him nor injustice done to him.