al-Ḥadīd 57:3

Huwa'l-Awwalu wa'l-Ākhiru wa'ẓ-Ẓāhiru wa'l-Bāṭin, wa huwa bi-kulli shayʾin ʿalīm "He is the First, the Last, the Outermost, the Innermost. He is the Knower of everything."

One of the densest sentences in the Qurʾān. Four names, two groups joined by conjunctions, a single pronoun. And none of the four names stands alone — each is paired with its opposite.

This verse must not be passed over without pausing, because what is done here is a different method from that of Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ. It was seen in the section on al-Ikhlāṣ: there the description was made by negation — lam yalid wa lam yūlad, wa lam yakun lahu kufuwan aḥad. By drawing a boundary, by leaving things outside. Here the method is the reverse: four positive names are given. But the result comes out at the same place, and how it comes out is the matter itself.

The names are not ranged at random. They come in two pairs, and each pair sets up an axis:

And what emerges when the two axes are taken together is this: no direction is left in which to escape.

There are two ways to encompass a thing. Either it is encompassed in time — its front and its back are held; or it is encompassed in place, in depth — its outside and its inside are held. The verse does both. The two ends of time, the two ends of visibility.

And the second axis is especially important, because the first axis by itself leaves a gap: when it is said "He was there before and He will be there after", a distance may be imagined in between — a beginning far off, an end far off, and in the middle a field in which a human being is on his own. The second axis closes this gap: both at the very outside and at the very inside.

The question of the root is disputed. The word is said to come either from the root و-ء-ل (to take refuge, to return — from the same root maʾāl: the place to which one returns) or from the root أ-و-ل (to return, to go back to one's origin — from the same root taʾwīl: to bring a word back to its origin). There is no firm agreement among the lexicographers.

The meaning is plain: the one who is before, before whom there is nothing.

The fineness here is this: awwal is a word of sequence. It reports the first member of a series. But when used of God it cannot mean being part of the series — because what is part of a series is subject to the rule of the series.

In classical theology this is expressed as: "awwaliyya is not priority in time but priority in being." That is, not "there was a time before Him and He existed in that time"; rather, time itself stays inside His being before.

This distinction is the direct continuation of the measure of tanzīh set down in the sections on al-Fātiḥa and al-Ikhlāṣ, and there is no need to repeat it here. I record only this: all four of the names carry the same risk. All four are words taken from the human being's own world — before, after, outside, inside. These are words that report a position, and position is a property of limited beings.

How the verse meets this risk lies in the names being given in pairs. I shall return to this below.

Root أ-خ-ر: what comes after, what stays behind, what is late.

The analysis of this root was made at al-Baqara 2/4. What was recorded there was this: the pair al-ākhira (the hereafter) and ad-dunyā reports not a value but a position — one "what comes after", the other (from the root d-n-w) "what is near". The world is not called "the world" because it is bad; it is so called because it is near.

That finding is directly useful here, and it raises a question: if al-ākhira is "the life that comes after", does the name al-Ākhir place God at the end of that life too?

The answer is no, and its ground is in the word itself. Al-ākhira is a vessel — a life lived in, a period. Al-Ākhir, by contrast, is an attribute, and it reports not a period but a position: the one beyond every end.

The Qurʾān sets this out plainly elsewhere: "Everyone upon it passes away; and there remains the face of your Lord, possessor of majesty and honour" (al-Raḥmān 55/26-27). Here two verbs are set against one another: fanāʾ (to come to an end) and baqāʾ (to remain). The name al-Ākhir is the noun form of this second verb.

What the presence of al-Awwal together with al-Ākhir does is this: when either is named alone the human mind builds a story — "in the beginning He was, then the universe came to be, and at the end He alone will remain." That story places God at the two ends of time and leaves the middle empty.

The verse closes this gap with the second pair that follows immediately. Ẓāhir and bāṭin have to do with "now" and "here".

Root ظ-ه-ر. Its concrete sense is surprising: ẓahr means the back. The back of a human being or of an animal.

Look at what derives from it:

• ظهر (ẓuhr) — noon; the clearest, shadowless moment of the day
• ظاهر (ẓāhir) — what is seen, what is open
• ظهير (ẓahīr) — a backer, a supporter (one who lends his back)
• مظاهرة — support, mutual backing
• إظهار — bringing into the open
• ظهور — coming out into the open

The logic of the root is this: the back is the outermost, the most visible, the most touched surface of a thing. This is why both "visibility" and "support" come out of the same root — the one who lends his back is the one who offers his outermost surface.

That is, aẓ-Ẓāhir means, before "the one who is seen", "the one who is outermost." There is nothing beyond a thing — because it is the outermost surface.

Root ب-ط-ن. Its concrete sense is again from the body: baṭn means the belly. What is inside, what is covered.

Derivatives:

• باطن (bāṭin) — the inner face, what is hidden
• بطانة (biṭāna) — the lining of a garment; and, figuratively, a confidant, an inner circle
• تبطّن — to go inside a thing

That is, al-Bāṭin means, before "hidden", "the one who is innermost." There is nothing further inside a thing — because it is the innermost layer.

Now what the pair does becomes visible. Ẓāhir and bāṭin are opposites in the dictionary, and of any being the two cannot be said at once. A thing is either outside or inside.

The verse says both at once. And this is not a contradiction but the declaration of a limit: a being of which two opposite attributes can be predicated at the same time and in full is outside the order from which the attributes are drawn.

The method is this, and it is the sibling of the method in Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ. There the description was made by negation — He did not beget, He was not begotten. Here the description is made by affirmations that cancel one another. The result is the same: in either case the reader can draw no picture with the concepts he has.

We may also put it thus: the four names do not give the reader a piece of knowledge, they show him an impossibility. You cannot say "there", because He is both here and there; you cannot say "at that time", because He is both before and after.

And the close of the verse confirms this: وَهُوَ بِكُلِّ شَىْءٍ عَلِيمٌ — "He is the Knower of everything." After the four names have said what the human being cannot know, the sentence closes by saying who does know. The direction is reversed: you cannot encompass Him; He has encompassed everything.

The two axes are also set up separately in other places in the Qurʾān:

For the axis of time: "Everything will perish except His face. His is the judgement, and to Him you will be returned" (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/88).

For the inner axis: "We created the human being, and We know what his soul whispers to him. We are nearer to him than his jugular vein" (Qāf 50/16).

This second is the plainest counterpart of the name al-Bāṭin and must be read with care. The expression "nearer than the jugular vein" tells of distance becoming unmeasurable — for the jugular vein is already inside the human being; something nearer than that is no longer in a place the word "nearness" can measure.

And precisely here a note is needed, because these are the verses most open to being misunderstood.

The name al-Bāṭin and the expression "nearer than the jugular vein" have been strained in two directions throughout history:

The first strain — corporealisation. To think that God is somewhere inside the human being, physically. This is the direct application of the concrete sense of the word (belly, inside) and violates the measure of tanzīh.

The second strain — identification. To draw from the sentence "He is the inner reality of everything" the conclusion that being and God are the same thing. This is not what the verse says; for the verse says aẓ-Ẓāhir as well, and a thing cannot be its own outer face and its own inner face at the same time.

This commentary takes no side in these disputes. The measure is the one the Qurʾān itself sets: لَيْسَ كَمِثْلِهِۦ شَىْءٌ — "There is nothing like Him" (al-Shūrā 42/11). This sentence determines how all four names are to be read: the names are real, but their counterparts in human language do not work as they do in human language when they are applied to Him.

The measure set down in the section on al-Ikhlāṣ holds exactly and is not repeated here.

All four come definite: al-Awwal, al-Ākhir, aẓ-Ẓāhir, al-Bāṭin. Had they been indefinite — awwalun, ākhirun — the sense would have been "He is a first, He is a last", implying that other firsts and other lasts might be found.

The article of definiteness closes this off: the one who is first is unique, the one who is last is unique. In Arabic this is called lām al-istighrāq — the definiteness that takes in the whole of a genus.

And between the four names there is the conjunction وَ, not asyndeton. This shows that the names are not explanations of one another but separate predications added to one another. All four are true separately, and all four together build a single picture.

That this verse should stand in this sūra is no accident. In verse 13 of the sūra, when the wall drawn between the hypocrites and the believers is described, the same two words will be used:

بَاطِنُهُۥ فِيهِ ٱلرَّحْمَةُ وَظَٰهِرُهُۥ مِن قِبَلِهِ ٱلْعَذَابُ "On its inner face is mercy, and on its outer face punishment."

That is, the ẓāhir/bāṭin pair the sūra uses of God in the third verse it uses ten verses later of a wall. This is a link built within the sūra, and it is too marked to be counted a coincidence.

What might it mean? I write this as my own reading: in the third verse ẓāhir and bāṭin were united in the same being — outer and inner, in the One. In the wall of the thirteenth verse, by contrast, the two are separated: one face mercy, the other face punishment. The same object, two different things according to the side from which it is looked at.

The sūra shows the picture of tawḥīd once as a joining and once as a parting. In the one, two opposites are gathered in a single being; in the other, a single object is divided into two opposite faces. And the difference is where the one who looks is standing.