Abstract
This essay explores how Muslim thinkers have understood the nature of divine speech and revelation (waḥy), from early traditional conceptions through Muʿtazilite and Sunni theology to the Akbarī tradition. Drawing on contemporary understandings of communication and the Qurʾān’s own broad use of waḥy, it suggests that divine communication need not be conceived simply in terms of spoken words. Revelation may instead be understood as the manifestation of divine guidance in forms appropriate to its recipients.
Keywords
Waḥy; revelation; divine speech; Qurʾān; communication; kalām nafsī; Muʿtazila; Ashʿarism; Māturīdism; Ibn al-ʿArabī; Akbarī tradition; divine manifestation
Every Muslim believes that the Qur’an is the speech of God. But few pause to ask a simple question: What does it actually mean for God to speak?
When we hear the word speech, we instinctively imagine a familiar scene: someone opens his mouth, words are formed, sounds travel through the air, and another person hears them. This experience is so deeply rooted in our everyday lives that we almost unconsciously project it onto God. We picture revelation as a heavenly conversation: God speaks, the angel Gabriel hears, the Prophet receives the message, and then recites it to humanity.
In the early traditional understanding, revelation was often illustrated through a simple analogy. A king sits behind a curtain, invisible to his subjects. Although they cannot see him, they hear his voice and receive his commands. Likewise, God remains beyond human sight while His speech reaches humanity through revelation. The analogy effectively conveyed God’s transcendence while preserving the reality of divine communication.[1]
There was nothing unreasonable about this picture. People naturally explain profound realities through the conceptual world available to them. Just as ancient astronomers described the heavens according to the scientific knowledge of their age, early Muslim scholars understood revelation through the most immediate experience of communication they knew: the human voice. Their analogy served its purpose well for many centuries.
Yet as Islamic thought matured, some scholars began to recognize that the reality of divine speech could not be reduced to the mechanics of human speech. If God is beyond time, space, sound, and physical organs, in what sense can He be said to “speak”? Is revelation simply a divine voice transmitted from heaven? Or does it point to a deeper reality that human language can only approximate?
These questions produced one of the most profound intellectual journeys in Islamic theology. Remarkably, each stage of that journey brought Muslim thinkers closer to a richer understanding of revelation—one that may speak to our own age more powerfully than ever before.
“Every Muslim believes that the Qur’an is the speech of God. But few pause to ask a simple question: What does it actually mean for God to speak?”
The Problem of Divine Speech
The first major challenge to this traditional picture came from the Muʿtazilite theologians. Their concern was not the Qur’an itself, but the nature of God.[2]
They asked a seemingly simple question: if speaking, as we know it, consists of sounds, letters, and words uttered one after another, how can such a process be attributed to the Eternal? Every spoken sentence unfolds in time. One word follows another. Every sound begins and ends. But God is beyond succession, change, and temporality. How, then, could divine speech resemble human speech?
To preserve God’s absolute transcendence, the Muʿtazila reached a bold conclusion. The Qur’an, as recited in Arabic, must be created. It cannot be identical with God’s eternal reality, for Arabic words consist of letters and sounds that exist in time. God, they argued, communicates by creating speech in the world rather than by producing eternal kalām.
This doctrine became one of the most controversial debates in Islamic history. For many Muslims, declaring the Qur’an “created” seemed to diminish its divine status. Yet the Muʿtazila intended precisely the opposite. Their aim was to protect God’s uniqueness from any trace of anthropomorphism. They wished to affirm that while revelation truly comes from God, its linguistic form belongs to the created world.
Neither side was entirely satisfied with the other’s position. Those who rejected the Muʿtazilite view feared that it weakened the intimate relationship between God and His revelation. The Muʿtazila, in turn, believed that their opponents still imagined divine speech too much like human speech. The debate seemed impossible to resolve.
“The source remains one; the manifestations are many.”
The Sunni Synthesis
A more balanced explanation eventually emerged through the Sunni theological schools of the Ashʿarīs and the Māturīdīs.[3] They accepted that God’s speech is indeed eternal, but they also recognized that the Arabic words of the Qur’an belong to history. To explain this, they distinguished between kalām nafsī—God’s eternal, uncreated speech—and its temporal manifestation in human language. The eternal reality belongs to God alone; the Arabic expression belongs to the created order.
This distinction represented a remarkable philosophical achievement. Instead of choosing between an eternal Qur’an and a created Qur’an, Sunni theologians argued that these descriptions refer to two different aspects of the same revelation. The divine reality is eternal; its expression in Arabic unfolds within history.
Yet one assumption remained common to almost all of these discussions. Communication was imagined almost exclusively as speech. The debate revolved around voices, words, letters, and sounds. The question was not whether God communicated, but how His speech reached the Prophet.
“Communication is far broader than conversation. It can take forms very different from the spoken exchange with which we are most familiar.”
Beyond Human Speech
Today, our understanding of communication has expanded dramatically. We know that communication is not limited to spoken words. Living cells communicate through chemical signals. Our nervous system functions through electrical impulses. Electronic devices exchange enormous amounts of information through invisible electromagnetic waves. Even the interaction between gravity and celestial bodies, or between sunlight and living organisms, reminds us that one reality can profoundly influence another without anything resembling human speech.
Interestingly, the Qur’an itself contains an intriguing illustration of communication beyond ordinary human speech. It describes an ant warning the other ants of Solomon’s approaching army, and Solomon understanding its warning (Q. 27:18–19). Elsewhere, the Qur’an says that Solomon had been taught “the language of birds” (manṭiq al-ṭayr) (Q. 27:16). Whatever the precise nature of such communication, the point relevant here is simple: meaningful communication need not take the form of ordinary human speech.
Communication, in other words, is far broader than conversation. It can take forms very different from the spoken exchange with which we are most familiar. This broader understanding invites us to reconsider revelation itself. If communication between created beings can occur in so many different ways, perhaps divine communication belongs to a level even deeper than speech.
To appreciate this possibility, it helps to look beyond human language to the way communication operates throughout creation. Consider the sun. It never speaks to the earth. Yet no one would deny that an extraordinary communication takes place between them. Without uttering a single word, the sun continuously communicates its light, heat, and energy. The same sunlight falls upon forests, oceans, deserts, flowers, and human beings. Yet it does not produce the same result in each. It becomes sweetness in fruit, fragrance in flowers, strength in trees, warmth in living bodies, and even the energy that powers modern civilization. The source remains one; the manifestations are many. Nothing about the sun itself changes. The diversity arises entirely from the nature of what receives its light.
“Revelation, therefore, cannot be reduced simply to spoken language. It is the Divine making His guidance present in forms appropriate to different recipients.”
Waḥy as Divine Communication
Interestingly, the Qur’an itself hints at a broader understanding of divine communication. It says, “Your Lord inspired (awḥā) the honey bee…” (Q. 16:68). The bee does not hear words or sentences, yet it receives divine guidance appropriate to its own nature. Likewise, the Qur’an speaks of God inspiring the mother of Moses (Q. 28:7), communicating with the angels (Q. 8:12), inspiring the disciples of Jesus (Q. 5:111), and even directing the heavens (Q. 41:12). Revelation (waḥy), therefore, cannot be reduced simply to spoken language. It is the Divine making His guidance present in forms appropriate to different recipients.
Revelation to the prophets belongs to the highest and most complete form of this divine communication. The Divine Reality does not become fragmented or altered as it reaches humanity. Rather, each prophet receives and manifests that reality according to the capacities of human existence and the needs of a particular historical community. What appears as Hebrew in one age, Aramaic in another, and Arabic in a third is not evidence of different divine speeches, but of one transcendent reality taking form within different human contexts. Prophetic revelation is therefore not merely another example of waḥy, but its highest and fullest expression. What distinguishes it is not that God suddenly begins to communicate through words, but that the divine communication reaches a rational human recipient entrusted with conveying God’s guidance to humanity.
This understanding bears a striking resemblance to the vision developed centuries ago by Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Akbarī tradition. Rather than treating revelation primarily as the transmission of speech, they understood it as the manifestation of the Divine within the created world.[4]
According to Ibn al-ʿArabī and his followers, divine speech does not travel through space like a voice crossing the air. Rather, it unfolds through successive levels of reality until it reaches the human world in the form of language. Just as existence itself is a continuous manifestation of the Divine, revelation is the manifestation of the divine attribute of speech within the human realm.
Akbarī writers explain that divine speech passes through different ontological levels before appearing as the Qur’an in Arabic. At each stage it becomes more particular, more limited, and more closely related to the world into which it is revealed. The Arabic Qur’an is therefore neither separate from God’s speech nor identical with it in its transcendence. It is its earthly manifestation.
This perspective also explains why the one Divine speaks through Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad (peace be upon all), while each revelation bears the imprint of its prophet, its language, and its historical community. The source is one; the manifestations are many. The diversity belongs not to God but to the conditions under which His self-disclosure appears.
“What appears as Hebrew in one age, Aramaic in another, and Arabic in a third is not evidence of different divine speeches, but of one transcendent reality taking form within different human contexts.”
A Deeper Appreciation of the Qur’an
Of course, every analogy eventually reaches its limits. God is infinitely beyond the created order, and no natural phenomenon can fully represent the mystery of revelation. Yet it may help us move beyond imagining revelation merely as a heavenly voice traveling from one place to another. Instead, we begin to see it as the self-disclosure of the Infinite within the finite—the Eternal becoming present, without ceasing to be eternal.
This way of understanding revelation carries an important implication. It reminds us that the Qur’an is neither merely a heavenly document dropped into history nor simply a human religious experience. It is both divine and historical. It is the eternal reality of God’s guidance manifested within the conditions of human language, culture, and history.
This realization should deepen, rather than weaken, our reverence for the Qur’an. After all, every act of communication requires the communicator to take the recipient into account. Parents simplify their language when speaking to children. Teachers adapt their explanations to the level of their students. A wise speaker does not diminish the truth by expressing it in terms the listener can understand; rather, this is precisely what makes genuine communication possible.
“The mystery of revelation may not be best imagined as a heavenly voice traveling across the universe. It may be better understood as the Infinite making Himself known within the finite.”
Divine revelation reflects this supreme wisdom. God does not reveal Himself in abstraction but addresses humanity in a form that human beings can receive. The Qur’an therefore speaks the language of seventh-century Arabia, refers to its history, employs its literary conventions, and responds to its questions—not because the Divine Reality is confined to that world, but because that was the world in which the final revelation first took root. Like sunlight assuming countless forms in living things, the one divine reality becomes accessible by manifesting itself within the capacities of its recipients.
Perhaps every age has understood revelation through the best analogies available to it. Earlier generations imagined a king speaking from behind a curtain because that image expressed transcendence within their intellectual world. Medieval theologians refined this picture by distinguishing between God’s eternal speech and its temporal expression. Today, our understanding of communication has become richer. We have learned that communication is not confined to words and sounds, and that one invisible reality can manifest itself in infinitely diverse forms without being divided or diminished.
The mystery of revelation, then, may not be best imagined as a heavenly voice traveling across the universe. It may be better understood as the Infinite making Himself known within the finite, the Eternal becoming present in history without ceasing to be eternal. The Qur’an is not merely something that God once said. It is the living manifestation of His guidance, continually inviting every generation to encounter the same divine reality through the changing circumstances of human history.
[1] For concise summaries of the positions of the major Islamic theological schools on divine speech, see Louis Gardet, “Kalām,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2009), accessed August 10, 2026, https://referenceworks.brill.com/display/db/ei2; Margaretha T. Heemskerk, “Speech,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2001–2006), accessed August 10, 2026, https://referenceworks.brill.com/display/db/eqo. For a detailed analysis of the theological debates concerning divine speech and the Qurʾān, see Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 235–303.
[2] For a brief overview of the Muʿtazilite doctrines, see Daniel Gimaret, “Muʿtazila,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2009), accessed August 10, 2026, https://referenceworks.brill.com/display/db/ei2.
[3] For a summary of the Sunni theological understanding of divine speech, see Halim Calis, “The Theoretical Foundations of Contextual Interpretation of the Qur’an in Islamic Theological Schools and Philosophical Sufism,” Religions 13, no. 2 (2022): 188–193, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13020188.
[4] For a detailed discussion of this Akbarī understanding of revelation and scriptural hermeneutics, see Halim Calis, “Where Ontology, Epistemology and Exegesis Intersect: The Impact of Waḥdat al-Wujūd on Akbarī Scriptural Hermeneutics,” in Being and Beyond: Ibn ʿArabī’s Waḥdat al-Wujūd and Its Legacy in Islamic Thought, ed. Zoheir Ali Esmail and Gregory Vandamme (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2027).
