He said to it, “Advance,” so it advanced; then He said, “Recede,” and it receded. He then proclaimed, “By My might and majesty, I have not created any creature more honored in My sight than you. Through you I seize and through you I give; through you comes reward and through you comes punishment.”

This ḥadīth that they cite as evidence from the standpoint of the Sacred Law, however, in fact points to the very opposite of their claim in several ways. One is that the phrase, “The first thing Allah created was the intellect; He said to it…” shows that He addressed it at the very first moment of its creation, not that it was the very first of all created things. It is like saying, “The first thing I did when I met Zayd was to greet him.” The intended sense is: “At the moment He created it, Allah said to it…” Here, the word “first” (awwal) is attached to a verbal noun, and that verbal noun is functioning as a temporal adverb, just as one might say, “This happened at the waning of the stars,” or “during the caliphate of ʿAbd al-Malik.” A similar usage appears in the Almighty’s words, “and by the withdrawing of the stars” (Q 81:18); “withdrawing” (idbār) is the verbal noun of adbara–yudbiru–idbāran.

Another implication is that something else must have been created before the intellect, because He said: