158 No god but God
actual words of God handed down through Muhammad, who was
little more than a passive conduit. In purely literary terms, the Quran
is God’s dramatic monologue. It does not recount God’s communion
with humanity; it is God’s communion with humanity. It does not
reveal God’s will; it reveals God’s self. And if the doctrine of tawhid
forbids any division in the Divine Unity, then the Quran is not just the
Speech of God, it is God.
This was precisely what the Traditionalist Ulama argued. If God
is eternal, then so are the divine attributes, which cannot be separated
from God’s self. This would make the Quran, as God’s Speech, an
eternal and uncreated thing. However, the Rationalist Ulama consid-
ered this to be an unreasonable point of view that would lead to a
number of unsolvable theological problems (Does God speak Arabic?
Is every copy of the Quran a copy of God?). The Rationalists argued
instead that God’s Speech reflects God but is not itself God.
Some members of the Ulama, such as Abu Hanifa, tried to bridge
the debate between the Rationalists and Traditionalists by claiming
that “our utterance of the Quran is created, our writing of it is created,
our reciting of it is created, but the Quran [itself] is uncreated.” Ibn
Kullab (d. 855) agreed, arguing that the Traditionalists were right to
consider the word of God as “one single thing in God,” but only inso-
far as it is not made up of physical letters and words. Ibn Kullab’s view
was refined by Ibn Hazm (994–1064), who posited the existence of a
“pre-revealed” Quran (as implied by the concept of Umm al-Kitab) in
which “what is in the pages of the book is... an imitation of the
[physical] Quran.” Once again, however, it was the influential Ahmad
ibn Hanbal who solidified the Traditionalist doctrine by claiming that
what a Muslim reads between the physical covers of the Quran—its
every word and letter—is itself the actual word of God: eternal and
uncreated.
The debate between the Rationalist and the Traditionalist Ulama
continued for a few hundred years, with each school alternating in
influence, until the end of the thirteenth century, when, partly in
response to al-Ma’mun’s disastrous Inquisition, the Traditionalist
position became the dominant position in Sunni Islam. Most Ratio-
nalists were branded as heretics, and their theories gradually lost