It is the widespread view that Sūrah Al-ʿAlaq is the first revealed message; the consensus is that it stands among the earliest cluster (including Al-Muddaththir, Al-Muzzammil, Al-Qalam).

For the message to find its full counterpart, the recipient must resonate with it in his inner world. If the message arrived in Greek and the recipient knew no Greek, how absurd that would be — most of the meaning conveyed by the limited words would evaporate. Likewise, not only the syntax but the semantics and the context of the message must find resonance within the recipient.

Even before revelation, the recipient was a principled person, unshaped by the norms of his surroundings and, moreover, one who questioned those norms. He never esteemed idols, kept away from wine, never took up the sword in conflict, never lied, kept trusts — a trusted man (al-amīn).

Yet strikingly, until age forty he undertook no initiative for changing his society, founded no known movement or organization, made no attempt at mobilization. He spent about fifteen years actively in trade, completing five journeys — the first at age twelve with Abū Ṭālib, two to Syria, two to Yemen — gaining brief contact with different cultures.

We know that the Messenger was forty when revelation came and that before that he often retreated to the Cave of Ḥirāʾ on the Mountain of Light (Jabal al-Nūr), withdrawing from people in seclusion. The signs suggest that immediately before revelation he passed through a serious season of questioning, striving to give inward meaning to the outer world he was observing.

We will read the opening verses of Sūrah Al-ʿAlaq in this context. That is, before anything else, a frame, a framework, a paradigm, a theoretical ground that gives meaning to existence will be built. Where did we come from, where are we going, what is the essence and purpose of creation, what or who brings creation about, what is our standing before it, and so on.

As this conceptual frame is constructed, judgments of good–evil, awareness of one's inner voices, the seeker's pilgrimage for meaning in the desert of meaninglessness; or the journey from the surface to the depth, from consumption – inertia – deadness to productivity – creativity – life — and how the right path (ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm) is to be found, what guides it, and what inner posture the person must take — will all be set forth.

Iqraʾ is from the same root as Qurʾān. It is rendered 'to read' but must be heard at a more fundamental semantic register than reading a book. Qurʾ: to gather parts for the sake of forming a whole. Qurʾ is also used for the periodic gathering and release of blood in the womb in women.

This is the first sense in Lane's Lexicon, given with the example:

> قَرَأَتْ هٰذِهِ النَّاقَةُ سَلًى قَطُّ مَا قَرَأَتْ جَنِينًا
> — This she-camel has not contracted her womb upon a young one.

From iqraʾ the meaning of bringing symbols and signs together into intelligibility derives, and from there the meaning of combining letters to read. To read is, after all, to ascend to a higher level of meaning by combining letters.

The shapes and symbols we read have names; they refer back to themselves (manā-ʾi ismī). The Phoenician alphabet is held to be the common ancestor of many of today's alphabets. In this alphabet each shape is in fact the drawing of an object in the outer world, and the name of the shape is the name of that object. The ancestor of Latin S, Greek Sigma, and Arabic Sīn is the Phoenician Shin: it is shaped like a tooth, and the letter's name, Shin, means tooth. In Arabic even now the word sin also means tooth.

Voicing letters one by one like this — seeing symbols through the manā-ʾi ismī — is recitation (tilāwa) but not reading (qirāʾa).

To ascend to a higher meaning, to combine through manā-ʾi ḥarfī — that is, to join with other symbols and reach the concept they point to — that is to read. The command of iqraʾ is not the vocalizing of symbols seen on paper or in nature; it is the combining of them upon an axis of context and a background framework, and through this, the reaching of an emergent meaning.

Gathering parts and forming a whole from them requires a meaning-frame (a framework), a paradigm, and an axiomatic foundation. By the phrase bismi rabbika alladhī khalaq, exactly this frame, this context, is being declared.

That is: as you gather symbols, signals, observations, evidences, signs — see the big picture, see the background, upon the axis of the Lord who Created.

Indeed, Sūrah Al-Aʿlā likewise opens sabbiḥ isma rabbika al-aʿlā; in the very second verse it points to creation with alladhī khalaq; and at the sixth verse it says sa-nuqriʾuka ('We shall make you read').

Today's scientific methodology is also a reading — a way of giving meaning to symbols around certain paradigms. The electron is a symbol, a sign. Its behaviour you can read with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, with the Many-Worlds interpretation, or with Pilot-Wave theory. All of these are different frame-readings within the physical world.

Without these frames on the physical ground, isolated observations do not combine, do not find meaning. The paradigm turns information into knowledge.

For each of these different physical readings, multiple metaphysical readings are also possible. When the metaphysical reading takes place within the frame of 'In the Name of the Lord who Created', it lets the light of tawḥīd be felt within the inner world. It turns knowledge (ilm) into acquaintance (maʿrifa).

From the root qa-ra-ʾa comes Qurʾān — the name of the message that gathers the signs of the cosmos and creation (the āyāt) and reads them within a framework.

The framework required for giving meaning to the cosmos is the Bismillāh declared openly 114 times in the Qurʾān. Bismi rabbika alladhī khalaq is the first form of the Bismillah revealed.

The human's universal observation is creation. Whereas Raḥmāniyya is reached through faith, Raḥīmiyya through inference, when a human opens his eyes he sees the created/the made/the object directly, without inference, 'objectively'.

The first Bismillah comes not as an attribute (bismi rabbika al-Khāliq), but as a verb (alladhī khalaq), conveying: 'You see creation — make sense of all events by taking the Lord behind it into context.'

The first message sent to an idolatrous society aims to place things and events upon the axis on which they ought to stand through right reading, and so to bring the person and the society to a righteous, productive, creative level and to ripen them into a state worthy of representing the thousand and one Names most vividly and meriting the title of caliphate (khilāfa).

If things and events, signs, āyāt are gathered within the wrong frame, idols arise: al-Lāt ordering war and peace, al-ʿUzzā providing power and protection, Manāt determining wealth, destiny, death.

The command 'Read in the name of your Lord who Created' is the beginning of an adventure in which the disjointed, scattered person and community will make sense of themselves and the cosmos anew upon the right axis.

(For the continuation, Felsufi refers to: 'Sūrah Al-ʿAlaq 2-3: The Fetus and Ontological Priority'.)