speaks by His will and power from eternity and forever, and that His speech is eternal in the sense that it is eternal in kind—that Allah has never ceased speaking by His will—as the early generations and the imams stated (1).

Then they said:

“It is eternally existent in itself.”

They split (2) into two groups. One group said:

“It is impossible for the eternal speech to consist of letters and sounds, because these cannot endure and come into existence one after another; anything preceded by something else cannot be eternal. What is eternal, therefore, is the meaning. It is also impossible for infinitely many meanings to exist at a single instant, while there is no basis for specifying one number rather than another. Thus, the eternal speech is one single meaning: it is the command concerning everything commanded and the report concerning everything reported. It is the meaning of the Torah, the Gospel, and the Quran; and it is the meaning (3) of the Verse of the Throne, the Verse of Debt, ‘Say: He is Allah, the One,’ and ‘Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of daybreak.’”

They denied that Arabic speech is the speech of Allah.

The second group said:

“Rather, the letters—or the letters (4) and sounds—are eternal, beginningless entities.”

They said:

“The sequence is intrinsic to them, not to their existence.”

They distinguished between a thing’s essence and the existence of that essence, just as many theologians distinguish between the Lord’s existence and His essence, and many of them, as well as the philosophers, distinguish between the existence of contingent things and their essences.

They said:

“The sequence lies [in] (5) their essence, not in their existence. Rather, they have existed from eternity and will exist forever; none of them ever preceded another (6), even though their essence (7)…”