*(For the analysis of the sūrah's first verse: 'Sūrah Al-ʿAlaq 1: The First Bismillah, the Big Picture, and the Metaphysical Paradigm'.)

In brief, the command 'Iqraʾ' / 'Read' has come; with 'bismi rabbika' / 'in the Name of your Lord' the manner of reading is declared; with 'alladhī khalaq' / 'He who Created' the object of reading is pointed out. Iqraʾ — in its broadest sense — is to gather symbols (the letters and words on paper, the scientific concepts in nature, the states and changes within the human's inner world) upon the axis of 'our Lord who Created' and so to reach a higher meaning. To read what is written is only one instance of this.

Rabbika, 'your Lord' — signals that the act of reading is an act of worship that draws the human nearer to his Lord.

In the verses that follow, the Most Generous Creator (al-Khāliq al-Akram) gives both the justification for such a general reading, explains it, and exemplifies it.

ʿAlaq is commonly translated as 'blood-clot'. This rendering is the result of Hippocratic texts and the old Greek medical literature entering the Islamic corpus after the 9th-century Arabic translations (İsmail Yakıt, Kur'an'ı Anlamak, pp. 35-43, Istanbul 2003).

ʿAlaq — that which clings, that which adheres, the muʿallaq (the hanging, the suspended). In the Quran, words from this root appear 7 times across 6 verses:

— An-Nisāʾ 4:129: ka-l-muʿallaqati — do not turn fully to one of your wives and leave the other suspended (suspended / hanging)
— Al-Ḥajj 22:5: the ordered sequence turāb → nuṭfa → ʿalaqa → muḍghatin muḥallaqatin wa-ghayri muḥallaqatin (the phase before the fetus: the fertilized egg clinging to the womb)
— Al-Qiyāmah 75:37-38: after sperm, the fertilized egg; fa-khalaqa fa-sawwā (then He created and proportioned)
— Al-Muʾmin 40:67: the sequence turābun → nuṭfatun → ʿalaqatun → ṭiflun → youth → old age → death; followed by kun fa-yakūn
— Al-Muʾminūn 23:12-14: sulālatin min ṭīn → nuṭfa (in a secure lodging) → ʿalaqa → muḍgha → bone → clothed with flesh → built into another creation

The leech is likewise called ʿalaq in Arabic because it clings, fastens to another living thing. And indeed in embryological development — just after the blastocyst stage, when the four-week embryo forms — it enters a phase nourished by the mother's blood whose shape resembles a leech.

The shared semantic position that all possible meanings of ʿalaq in this verse point to lies next door to: 'smallness, neediness, basicity, insignificance, lowliness.'

So, if we situate the verses that follow in this context (cf. The Principle of Textual-Location Context), we can hear this message:

> Read in the name of your Lord who Created. Look: He created the human from an insignificant, needy, lowly beginning. Then He took him up and raised him to a noble (karīm) position — one that would read the cosmos and itself, address its Lord.

(96:6, 7 — because the human sees himself as mustaghnī / self-sufficient, he transgresses the bound.)

Once again iqraʾ is said — but this time the matter of akram is added to the context of creation, and we are asked to gather the parts under the heading 'Your Lord, the Creator, is the Most Generous'.

— In the first iqraʾ: 'Rabbika alladhī khalaq' — emphasis upon His acts.
— In the second iqraʾ: 'rabbuka al-akram' — emphasis upon the Name itself.

Karam is generally rendered as 'one who possesses or bestows favour' — but this is not a full rendering. al-Iṣfahānī in his al-Mufradāt says:

Renderings like 'generous, open-handed, much-giving' also fall short — in the Quran, words from this root appear in 47 places, and only a few of them carry the direct sense of 'giving, bestowing'.

They carry, far more often, the senses of 'noble, honourable, important'. Both Turkish and Arabic use ikrām with the meaning 'to bestow' — true. But this is the secondary meaning, derived from the primary sense of 'to honour, to dignify, to render important'.

Verses that bear structural and semantic relation to this one bring clarity (cf. The Principle of the Semantic-Structural Relational Web):

Then what does the primary meaning — 'preferred, honourable, noble, important, weighty' — exactly say?

When karam is taken within the context of divinity and creation, it confers upon the thing-honoured an Ontological Necessity (more precisely, an Ontological Priority). What does this mean?

In one sense, it is 'teleological causality'. That is: targeting the fruit of a tree, and making the fruit the reason for sowing the seed and watering the sapling — is to make it 'ontologically prior'.

Another example: when an architect drafts the plan of a great palace, first he attends to the project's true aim — namely, the human who will live in it and his needs. He then considers all of the palace's functions according to these needs; the aesthetics, structure, orientation, and other features are designed in accordance with this aim.

There is in this process an order of importance. Those that come earlier in this order are 'ontologically prior' to those that come later.

This generous architect, by designing and building so vast a palace for a relatively small human, has performed ikrām — has honoured that human, dignified him, made him weighty.

The order and priority in the design-plan of the palace is wholly different from the order and priority of its construction.

— The priority in the plan is 'ontological priority' — the order, 'teleological causation'.
— The priority in the construction is the real-time one, 'temporal priority' — the order, 'efficient causation'.

What is ontologically prior comes further to the front in the ordering of justification of creation.

In this sense, at the deepest centre of creation — by the inward-facing side of the name al-Akram — stands the One whose existence is necessary, wājib al-wujūd (the default Being), Allāh, al-Khāliq al-Raḥmān.

The side of al-Akram that faces creatures points to the One who most honours, most weights, most makes-noble — pointing to what He places at the bottom of the order of justifying creation.

We would expect this 'what' to be a species that is conscious, speaking, present in both the material and the spiritual realms, that reads (gives meaning to) creation and also reads creation to others (explicates its meaning) — and this is the Human.

Among humans, the most karīm — the one with the greatest ontological priority — we would expect to be the one who, with sacred apparatus (a decoder), reads in a timeless manner the writings (signals) embedded in the depths of things and events conveyed by Jibrīl al-Amīn, and conveys this divine message to us: the master of the Ascension, the Messenger al-Akram, upon him be peace.

Thus, as He proportioned the heavens into seven layered firmaments, He very finely tuned the constants of physical law (Fine Tuning of the Universe), preparing the ground for the emergence of a conscious being — the human…

He took the human through aeons, epochs, very long ages in which his name was not yet worth mentioning…

He gave him — as a temporary reference point (wāḥid-i qiyāsī) for opening the secrets of existence and the talisman / lock of the cosmos — the trust of a self that may look at the inner and outer world as if it possessed the names and attributes of God (the benlik).

With this faculty He laid upon him the trusts of understanding (ʿilm), choosing (irāda), and modifying things / events (qudra).

He made the human a vicegerent on earth — the sun, the moon, the positions of stars, the stable elements (beginning with iron) cooked in stars and sent to earth, plants and animals, mountains, rains, underground resources, and so much more of natural events and laws — He placed all in the human's service.

He taught the human all the names (al-asmāʾ kullahā) — that is, seven layers of abstraction, abstract thinking, and conceptualization…

…and He taught him to set it forth, to narrate, to narrate (anbiʾhum, ʿallamahu al-bayān).

He created the human in the finest mould (aḥsani taqwīm) and shaped him so as to rise to the highest of high stations (aʿlā ʿilliyyīn) — and so He honoured (karīm) him.

Thus the human in creation, and among humans the Beloved of the Sublime (Ḥabīb-i Kibriyāʾ) — as if the two ends of a drawn bow had been brought together, and even nearer — He set immediately beside His own central Name (wujūb), and so He honoured (karīm) the human.

(For the continuation, Felsufi refers to: 'Sūrah Al-ʿAlaq 4-5: The Prefrontal Cortex, Artificial Intelligence, and the Quantum Wave Function'.)