Allah's Eternal Speech Is Free of Language

Obviously, we cannot comprehend Allah (swt), nor His attributes; therefore, we cannot comprehend the speech of Allah in its original form. While the speech of Allah is in that eternal form, we cannot comprehend it. We just don't have the ability. Therefore, in order for us to understand it, for it to be a message to us, He, Allah (swt), revealed it in this beautiful, eloquent Arabic that was unsurpassable by anybody else, unmatched by any Arabic speaker or poet; and it is His speech. But this is the created version that reflects His divine archetype, that reflects His eternal speech. For anyone meeting this for the first time, it does take some time to settle.

What Allah has, and what He has had from eternity, is the divine archetype of a kalām which has no letters, or words, or sounds, because Allah is not in need of those. And then He revealed a portion of that as the Torah, in Aramaic, or whatever language it was. But Allah's kalām is not in Arabic, or Aramaic, or anything like that. Allah's kalām, Allah's eternal speech, is free of language. It is His speech, and only Allah knows it. But He reveals it in the different languages for the people of the time, because that is what they can comprehend and understand. It is at their level.

But it is still special, because it is composed by Allah: not by the Prophet (peace be upon him) through inspiration from Allah, but directly by Allah, in those words. That is the distinction between it and the hadith, for instance. The hadith are inspirations, which the Prophet (peace be upon him) then articulates; whereas the Qur'an is the direct wording of Allah (swt) for mankind, in Arabic.

This makes it easy for us to understand a number of things. For instance, a question that arises from it concerns the tenses in the Qur'an. Some people might say, and this is something the Muʿtazilah would say, that in the Qur'an we have the past tense, and we have the future tense. For example, Allah (swt) says: wa laqad arsalnā Nūḥan, We sent Nūḥ as a messenger; kadhdhabat qawmu Lūṭ, the people of Lūṭ, they denied. There are a number of things in the past tense; there are things in the future tense. If time does not apply to Allah, if past, present or future does not apply to Allah, then how is it that His speech comprises past, present and future tenses?

The answer is quite simple. He revealed it to us at this particular time in human history, and thus He made it relevant. Because Nūḥ (peace be upon him) passed before us, and the people of Lūṭ, and Ṣāliḥ (peace be upon them), passed before us, He mentioned that in the past tense, so that it makes sense to us. But in the eternal divine archetype of Allah (swt), in that speech, there is no tense, because for Him, tense doesn't matter. The information is there, but it is made relevant to us in these particular wordings.