For this reason, the very first passage God sent down to His Messenger Muhammad—peace and blessings be upon him—was the chapter:

“Read in the name of your Lord who created,
created man from a clot.
Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous,
who taught by the pen,
taught man what he did not know.”
(Sūrat al-‘Alaq, 1–5)

In this sūrah—verified in sound reports as the first revelation—the Exalted affirms that He is the originator of the four modes of existence. He begins with concrete existence, the real existence that subsists in itself, speaking first in general of creation and then specifying the human being:
“Read in the name of your Lord who created, created man from a clot.”

He then alludes to the remaining three existences that correspond to this, again combining the general with the specific:
“Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous, who taught by the pen, taught man what he did not know.”

Here He mentions knowledge in universal terms, singles out man for instruction, and states that the teaching is by means of the pen—that is, writing. Writing corresponds to speech, and speech corresponds to the meaning lodged in the heart; for writing does not in itself signify the meaning, but rather points to the utterance that conveys it.

Hence, someone unfamiliar with the writer’s language—if he encounters an Arabic script yet his own tongue is Persian and he does not understand Persian—will not grasp the meaning, for writing signifies only through the mediation of spoken words.

Accordingly, when they say, “The natural universal exists outside [the mind],” just as one might say that