And all of this necessarily fosters a strong determination and desire to understand the meaning of al-Samad. This is something people recognize in themselves: when someone recites this surah time and again, he longs to understand what he is saying, for the soul finds it distressing to utter words it does not understand. Thus, the incentive to understand this name was present among them—strong, widespread, and recurrent—and there was no obstacle to it, since nothing prevented them from asking about this name.

This is further reinforced by two considerations. The first is that whenever the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) taught his Companions the Quran, he taught them the knowledge and practice it contained. As Abū ʿAbd al-Rahmān al-Sulamī said: “Those who taught us the Quran—ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān, ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd, and others—told us that when they learned ten verses from the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), they would not proceed beyond them until they had learned the knowledge and practice contained in them. They said: