names of names, which have the inviolability belonging to what is named through their names. The letters inscribed within the written Qurʾan are entities of speech from which God’s speech, by which He is described, is understood. To what does that description return? This is another science, concerning which people differ, and we have no need to enter it.
Insofar as He speaks, the Real, glorified is He, mentions Himself through His names according to how speech is ascribed to Him, a relation to which no how is assigned[20]. Those names have names among us in every speaker’s language.
In Arabic the name through which He named Himself insofar as He speaks is called Allah; in Persian, Khuday; in Abyssinian, Waq; in the Franks’ tongue, Kriṭur. So it is in every tongue.
These are the names of those names. They multiply through the multiplicity of relations and are magnified by every group for what they signify. Hence we were forbidden to travel with the written Qurʾan to the enemy’s land. It is our hands’ writing: leaves inscribed by originated hands with ink compounded from gallnuts and vitriol. Without this signification, neither magnification nor belittlement would befall them.
Hence speech is called ugly or beautiful according to custom and the revealed Law, and the like, because of what these expressions signify through convention and coinage. This is a noble science, apprehended as the affair is only by the people of unveiling,
Notlar
[20]
(The phrase has been corrected to “لا تُكيَّف نسبته,” “no how is assigned to its relation,” as in the compared edition, instead of “لا تكليف نسبته” in the previous file.)
