Al-Awwal

The root. Al-Awwal comes from ʾ-w-l, the root behind awwal (first) in its plain, everyday sense — the beginning of a series, the point before which nothing in that series stands. The root names position rather than quality: not the best or the greatest, simply what comes before everything else that follows it.

What it means here. Al-Awwal is read as the one who precedes all existence absolutely — not first among things that came to exist, since nothing existed before creation began, but first in the sense that no beginning stands before His own, which itself had no beginning. It is inseparable in the tradition from Al-Akhir, met next, and from Adh-Dhahir and Al-Batin, all four spoken together as bounding the whole of existence from every direction at once: before it, after it, on its visible surface, and within what is hidden.

Where it is met. All four names appear together in a single verse, Surah Al-Hadid 57:3: "He is the First and the Last, the Ascendant and the Intimate, and He is, of all things, Knowing." This is essentially the only place the Quran states Al-Awwal directly of Allah, and the tradition treats the four as a set precisely because the Quran itself presents them as one.