بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Man’s Imagination is made from small subatomic particles, Allah created the human mind as an archetype of the pen which was the first intellect Allah created when He created the Universe. We are created in Allah’s image, Allah imagined the universe and everything in it into existence, when we consider the mind, imagined is the act of creating in this respect and for Allah the particles of the universe are His ink which He used to create all life and space. So when we imagine something we likewise move these particles to create the image in our mind this is how we are created on the image of Allah, but Allah can give life to what He imagines because His control and knowledge of matter in the Universe is complete, this is essentially the sum total of what Imam Ibn Arabi said about man and the imagination.
This work will explain in greater detail what all this means, what this understanding is based upon and what the scholars said about these matters.
Allah’s Messenger (peace be upon him) said: The first thing which Allah created was the Pen. He commanded it to write. It asked: What should I write? He said: Write the Decree (al-Qadr, the fate of all things). So it wrote what had happened and what was going to happen up to eternity. (Tirmidhi)
The Prophet (saws) said “The first thing that Allah created was the Intellect,”
The scholars said these all amount to the same thing by simile, the Pen is an Intellect created from Light it can be understood as a light similar to the light of our own intellect which we see in our mind and that light in our head imagines the sum total of our knowledge, the Pen was a light which imagined the sum total of the knowledge Allah gave it.
The Prophet (saws) said “The first thing that Allah created was the Pen and He said to it: Write! So it wrote what is to be forever (the rest of time).” (Tabarani and Abu Nu’aym)
The Prophet (saws) said, “The first thing created by Allah was the pen, then, He ordered it to write, so it wrote everything that will happen till the Day of Judgment.” (narrated by Tirmidhi, Abu-Dawud, and Ahmad).
The muqataat letters of the Quran are the letters that some surah’s begin with, Alif Lam Mim etc, it can be established from ahadith with ease what the letter nun (pronounced noon) means, which is Allah’s name for space, in terms of quantum mechanics (the physics of small particles) and the subatomic world it refers to the outer most layer of subatomic space, we are referring here to the depth of space as we go inside Atoms and the particles they are made from.
We can imagine this better by asking what is the smallest thing in the universe, most people know of the Atom but the Atom is created from smaller particles and they are created from even smaller particles, so then how far does this go on for, the prophet Muhammad (saws) knew about all this and spoke of it in Ahadith we will mention latter, this knowledge relates to the mind and imagination because the mind creates the images we see from these small particles.
The first volume of Imam Tabari’s History which deals with the creation of the universe gives clear examples of the prophet’s names for deeper subatomic depths, if we think of the Atom as one region and the particles the atoms are created from as a deeper region and the smaller particle they are created from as another region (depth) the prophet (saws) gave names to these subatomic depths, insha allah i will be writing about this in the future in a book i intend to call “The Prophet’s (s) Understanding of Space”.
Allah in Surah (chapter) 68 of the Quran connects all these topics together, space the pen and the human intellect, He says, “Nun. By the pen and what they inscribe, You are not, [O Muhammad], by the favor of your Lord, a madman.”(68:1-2), Allah here is defending the prophet (saws) from the accusation of madness levelled at him by the pagans. So then why does Allah take an oath by the letter nun and the pen and what it writes to prove that the prophet (saws) is not mad?
A person who has no understanding of the “nun” or the pen would think this statement proves the opposite, because it doesn’t seem to make sense.
Ahadith say one of the first things Allah created in the Universe was the Nun, which tells us that the “nun” is important to the Universe. If we start with the nun, and the understanding that Allah means space (this is understood from ahadith), combine this with the deeper understanding that the pen, which the prophet (saws) often called a light and an intellect to describe what it is, as the scholars explained the pen was created from the same type of light as our intellect (imagination), Allah commanded the Pen when he created it to write the future of all things from the beginning of the Universe to it’s end.
These are the three things being mentioned in this verse, space, the first intellect Allah created and the predestined future of all things, It then becomes obvious what these things have to do with madness and defending the prophet (saws). They accused the prophet’s (saws) mind of not perceiving clearly and being mad, so Allah swore by the very things that make up a humans mind and the perfect archetypes they come from that the prophet (saws) wasn’t mad.
Mans imagination manipulates subatomic particles to create the image we see in our mind and dreams, these particles exist at the most outer layer of space (or subatomic depth). Allah swore by the outer most layer of space itself (the nun) which is made from these particles and other matter. Then He swore by the first intellect He created (the pen) which saw the entire universe and wrote down it’s future, the human mind is an archetype of this intellect (pen), Allah says “all (things) have We registered in a prototype (Imam in arabic, the Imam is someone copied in prayer, literally Allah creates things from archetypes, Man was created in Allah’s image, DNA is another perfect example of this), the archetypal Book”(36:12).
Man’s intellect (similar to the pen) gathers information then attempts to forecast what should be occurring in the future then we act on what we foresee, so the future is something mans intellect is always trying to discover like the Pen. Hence Allah swore by the certainty of the Pen to see the future and it’s ability to record the fate of all things, which the intellect of man mimics that the prophet (saws) wasn’t insane.
The conclusion is, that a mind which has certainty of what is going to occur, like the pen, can never be mad, this is the relationship between the nun, the pen and what it inscribes in relation to madness and the prophet’s (saws) mind.
It is a tremendous standard for the prophet’s mind to be compared to, because they are perfect at what they do, which Allah states clearly in the next verses (68:4) “And lo! thou art of a tremendous nature.”
Imam Maybadi said about this surah “Nun. By the Pen. Nun is the inkwell, and the Pen is a pen of light. The writer is the Forgiving Lord. He wrote with the Pen in the emerald Tablet, He wrote with the ink of light, He wrote on the notebook of carnelian (a precious stone), He wrote the story and the deeds of the created things. He wrote the heart of the recognizer with the Pen of generosity, He wrote with the ink of bounty, He wrote on the notebook of gentleness, He wrote the attribute and description of the honorable: He wrote faith in their hearts [58:22]. He wrote in the Tablet, and He wrote it all for you”. (Tafsir Kashf al-Asrar wa ʿUddat al-Abrar By Rashid al-Din Maybudi, 68:1).