*(For the preceding verses of the sūrah: 'Sūrah Al-ʿAlaq 1: The First Bismillah, the Big Picture, and the Metaphysical Paradigm' and 'Sūrah Al-ʿAlaq 2-3: The Fetus and Ontological Priority'.)

The root qalam appears in the Quran in 4 places (Al-ʿAlaq 4, Al-Qalam 1, Luqmān 27, Āl ʿImrān 44). Two are plural (aqlām), two singular. Etymologically: the sharp tip-piece carved from wood.

In Āl ʿImrān, the aqlām used for casting lots are wooden pieces (like divinatory arrows); the other three occurrences denote an instrument used for writing.

The first five verses of Sūrah Al-ʿAlaq — the verses they touch, the words chosen, their specific arrangement, and the topic they address — have been treated at length in many tafsīrs. Yet many sides of this verse-cluster have not yet been brought to attention.

We wish to convey a perspective we believe will help in reading the Quran and the cosmos together. Let us set it forth step by step under a few sub-headings:

By saying ʿallama bi'l-qalam, the Lord — al-Akram — informs us that He taught by means of an act of recording — especially teaching the human what he did not know.

Information / data acquisition and ʿilm (knowledge) are different things. One of the most essential conditions of ʿilm is the abstraction of information and the reaching of general rules and principles. If someone memorizes every position of the moon every day for hundreds of years, that does not yet count as ʿilm.

But by means of equations — say, Kepler's laws — he can abstract and generalize across all times, and so derive both past and future positions from the calculation of those equations. This is ʿilm.

Machine Learning, at the foundation of Artificial Intelligence, works in the same way — reaching a model that most effectively compresses the data.

Suppose we have gathered hundreds or thousands of data points to understand the behaviour of a thing. Merely writing all these data points into a table is not yet ʿilm. The data must be compressed by a model — expressed more tightly, more abstractly — so that with the same model we can generalize and predict cases we have not seen.

When we represent all this data with a few constants and a formula, we have reached an abstract behaviour that can generalize from observations.

This is a one-dimensional example (only x is being measured); very simple. Normally, the things and events we see we represent in the brain with thousands of features. Yet we still compress them into 3-5 features so that we may remember them and generalize from them.

In the language of the Quran, names are abstract behaviours, generalizable to genus/kind, lying behind objects and events — like the parametric polynomial formula in our example.

Heaven (Al-Baqarah 2:29), name (Al-Baqarah 2:31), and informing / nabaʾ / narration / the establishment of causal relation (Al-Baqarah 2:33) — these belong to the same topic but require their own separate treatment.

For now, let us set down only this: learning is the process whereby information is related to prior information, abstracted, and brought to general principles, rules, and judgments.

Writing — in its widest sense — is the recording of events and concepts with letters, that is, with symbols (record). But the count of these symbols, letters, characters is very limited beside the count of words to be recorded. Likewise, the count of words is limited beside the count of sentences that can be written.

We record events and concepts by the composition of a small number of symbols and words — and this is writing. Language's compositional character brings with it also its generative power.

To convey an event to someone in writing is not, after all, to send a high-resolution three-dimensional video recording of that scene. It is to record, with sentences, words, and letters, the generalizable features of the event and to send that record.

The meaning of 'generalizable features': the recipient's world must contain a counterpart of those letters and words. This kind of abstraction and generalization is necessarily an information loss. Indeed, even if a camera recorded the video, it still could not convey the event with all its relations.

Say you saw an apple and wished to convey it in writing. By writing 'apple' you in fact omit, leave aside much of the information of that observation, and convey the feature you wished to convey. Try to describe its colour and scent — still you cannot convey it fully. Beyond shape, colour, scent — that apple has its position, the position of its molecules, their motion, temperature, age, the gravity upon it, the sun's pull, its atom count, and so many features that no writing exhausts them. And this for the observation of a single apple.

In sum: writing too is, in essence, the recording with signs and symbols of the most important (karīm) features of things and events. Let us set this aside as well.

Just as the reading-of-iqraʾ is the bringing-together of letters and symbols to reach a higher meaning, the pen's operation is the dividing of the higher meaning into symbols and the laying of those symbols side by side in writing, in recording.

Under this semantic umbrella stand:

— Wooden pens
— Typewriter / keyboard
— The encoder portions of artificial intelligence
— The human brain's prefrontal cortex
— And, at a higher level: the cosmic pen — that which writes the future, taking the Divine Names as its ground and looking to the past (effective cause), in the form of laws, possibilities, the wave function — and writes the past, taking the Divine Names as its ground and looking to the future (telos), in the form of events, phenomena, particles — the pen that writes the Lawḥ al-Maḥfūẓ, whose individuality and nature science has not yet fully clarified but whose features have been discovered piecemeal.

The reference to human reason and to the phenomenon known as the measurement problem of quantum mechanics under the meaning of the Pen may seem strange or unfamiliar. Let us unfold it a little.

The human brain's prefrontal cortex — abstracts the features through which the things and events it experiences (sees, hears, feels) can be related to its prior experiences (feature extraction), and records, writes them onto the hippocampus.

Thus the prefrontal cortex too is a kind of pen in the material world. For the human's inner world, reason is a kind of pen, and memory a kind of Lawḥ al-Maḥfūẓ.

Furthermore, further in Sūrah Al-ʿAlaq, the nāṣiya (the forelock / forehead) is emphasized and points again to this meaning:

Sūrah Al-Raḥmān opens with a semantic background like that of the opening of Al-ʿAlaq: al-Raḥmān, ʿallama al-Qurʾān (taught the Qurʾān), khalaqa al-insān (created the human), ʿallamahu al-bayān (taught him the explication).

In its 41st verse it points back to the functions of the forehead as the planner of the misdeed and the foot as its executor:

For the meaning of the forehead as the seat of planning, see also Hūd 11:55-56.

The very last verse of Sūrah Al-ʿAlaq commands the prostration that draws near. Both in physical and in metaphoric-symbolic sense — uniting the forehead, the prefrontal cortex, the intellect, with the place of the feet, surrendering to God — through which the person is to draw near to his Lord.

The functions of the human — ʿālam al-ṣaghīr (the microcosm) — are present also in the creation of the cosmos — insān al-akbar (the macrocosm). This is a matter to which Bediüzzaman points in many places and explicates openly in some.

In the outer world we observe in common (ʿālam al-shahāda) there is also: a mechanism that performs the function of ʿaql al-akbar and ʿaql al-awwal, a kind of book / Lawḥ al-Maḥfūẓ / DNA that performs long-term memory, and a kind of computer RAM / erasable tablet / Lawḥ al-Maḥw wa-al-Ithbāt / mRNA corresponding to short-term memory.

To gather it up, we glimpsed a single drop of the rain of meaning these opening verses pour upon us:

Read — gather, with reason, the piecemeal concepts you see in the cosmos and within yourself, upon the context of the Name of the Lord who Created, and draw near to Him.

Look — He created the human, in essence, from ʿalaq — that which clings to the wall of the womb (a manifestation of the name Raḥīm), needing the mother's blood like a leech.

Read — Your Lord is al-Akram; His existence is the most essential; wājib al-wujūd, His existence is necessary. Because He is al-Akram, He is the source that bestows, dignifies, makes weighty.

He took you — and the whole human kind — when you were a shapeless organism, not yet worth mentioning, and proportioned you; gave you a brain; and through the development of the prefrontal cortex, gave you a pen — that is, intellect — that abstracts things and events and what lies beyond them into the hippocampus by naming them; and lifted you above the animal level.

And with the cosmic pen of destiny — the one that writes the world we call 'the future' (at the intersection of bāṭin and ākhir, the names of potentiality and the realm of possibility, where matter is touched and quantum-mechanical behaviour is shown); and the one that writes the world we call 'the past' (at the intersection of ẓāhir and awwal, the settled facts and classical-mechanical behaviour) — He taught you what you did not know.

Because Allah, Rabb al-ʿālamīn, taught the human what he did not know — making him read and inscribe these writings of destiny by means of the pen of reason — He raised him to an akram position among the created.

The verses of Sūrah Al-ʿAlaq up to this point lay a foundation of belief and feeling; they bind the person's inner world, the outer world of observation, and his Lord. The verses that follow will set forth the inner posture required to draw near to Allah, the action upon the outer world, and the relationship we must establish with our Lord.

This has become a long essay — but if looked at attentively, alongside the analysis we are also developing a new terminology and language for reading the Quran with the book of the cosmos, and the cosmos with the book of the Quran.