Differences in intended meaning and scholarly usage lead some expressions to be treated as literal, figurative, shared or technically transferred. With “Qur’an,” “speech” and “heard,” the key question is whether the principal referent is the meaning subsisting in God or the wording signifying it.
What remains important is that the meaning and its expression have a genuine relation; linguistic attributions are not simply meaningless.
Calling a phrase “figurative” does not complete the analysis. One must identify the primary referent, the relation licensing the attribution and the usage in which it occurs.