The Quran: The Speech of Allah

The central doctrinal battle of Ahmad ibn Hanbal's life was the question of whether the Quran was created or uncreated, and Usul al-Sunnah states his position with absolute clarity: the Quran is the speech of Allah (kalam Allah), and it is not created. This was the position of the Companions, the Successors, and the scholars of the early generations. The Mu'tazilites, drawing on Greek philosophical frameworks, argued that an eternal Quran would imply an eternal entity alongside Allah, which they held to be theologically unacceptable. Ahmad regarded this argument as a subtle but catastrophic error that undermined the foundations of Islamic theology.

Ahmad's reasoning was grounded in the texts of the Quran itself. Allah describes the Quran as His speech (kalam) in numerous verses, and the Companions understood this to mean that it was an attribute of the divine essence, not a created thing. To say that the Quran is created is, in Ahmad's view, to say that the speech through which Allah communicates with His creation is something He brought into being, which raises the further question of what existed before it and what the divine speech was before the Quran came to be. The logic of the Mu'tazilite position, he argued, leads to consequences that are more damaging to monotheism than the position they sought to avoid.

Ahmad also addressed the distinction between the Quran as an attribute of Allah and the Quran as it is recited, written, and heard by human beings. He acknowledged that the physical letters and sounds through which the Quran is expressed come into existence in time, but he was extremely cautious about articulating this distinction in ways that might give comfort to those who wanted to qualify the fundamental principle. His caution on this point led him to avoid the formulation 'my recitation of the Quran is created,' a statement he regarded as dangerously close to the Mu'tazilite position even when uttered by those who intended it to refer only to the act of recitation rather than the Quran itself.

The Mihna, the trial imposed by the caliph al-Ma'mun and continued by his successors, demanded that scholars publicly affirm the createdness of the Quran on pain of imprisonment or worse. Ahmad's refusal to comply, maintained even under physical torture, transformed him into the central symbol of Sunni resistance to theological innovation backed by state power. Usul al-Sunnah was written in the aftermath of this experience, and its treatment of the Quran reflects both the clarity of Ahmad's convictions and the gravity of what was at stake. For Ahmad, the uncreated nature of the Quran was not a peripheral theological nicety: it was the test case for whether Muslims would allow rationalist philosophy to override the testimony of revelation and the consensus of the early generations.