Name 95 of 99

البديع

The Incomparable Originator

Al-Badīʻ

The impossible creature — invention without precedent.

Meaning

From b-d-ʻ, which Ibn Fāris gives as two origins: beginning a thing and making it not from a model, and being cut off and exhausted. Of the first he gives abdaʻtu sh-shayʼ, when you begin it with no model before it, and Allah as badīʻu s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ. The Qurʼan says it of Allah twice, in construct, never as al-badīʻ: at 2:117, answering those who said Allah has taken a son, and at 6:101, answering those who ascribed to Him sons and daughters. Aṭ-Ṭabarī: He brought them into being without origin or model. Two more words of the root stand in the Qurʼan: bidʻan, first, at 46:9, and ibtadaʻūhā at 57:27, a monasticism people originated; and Ibn Fāris derives al-bidʻah from the root. Al-Mubdiʼ, Name 58, is a different root, b-d-ʼ.

Root b-d-ʻ — beginning a thing and making it not from a model (ibtidāʼ ash-shayʼ wa-ṣunʻuhu lā ʻan mithāl)

Counted on the Tanzil text with the pause marks removed, every return read in its verse: bāʼ, dāl and ʻayn in that order, at most two letters between each, return six words, and a window of six letters returns the same six. Two are bi-duʻāʼ, of d-ʻ-w (19:4, 19:48). B-d-ʻ has four words in four verses: badīʻu s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ, of Allah, in construct, at 2:117 and 6:101; bidʻan at 46:9, which aṭ-Ṭabarī reads as first, I am not the first of the messengers, with Ibn ʻAbbās, Mujāhid and Qatādah; and ibtadaʻūhā at 57:27, the monasticism of those who followed ʻĪsā, glossed by aṭ-Ṭabarī aḥdathūhā, they introduced it. The definite al-badīʻ is not in the Qurʼan, and neither is al-mubdiʼ. Ibn Fāris (Maqāyīs al-Lughah, vol. 1, pp. 209–210): two origins, ibtidāʼ ash-shayʼ wa-ṣunʻuhu lā ʻan mithāl and al-inqiṭāʻ wa-l-kalāl; Allah is badīʻu s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ; mā kuntu bidʻan, I was not the first; ubdiʻat ar-rāḥilah, the mount gave out; and from some of that al-bidʻah was derived. Ibn Kathīr at 6:101: the bidʻah is so named because it has no like in what went before. In the six editions badīʻu s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ is in the supplication of a man the Prophet ﷺ heard: he called on Allah by His Mighty Name, bi-smihi l-ʻaẓīm, at Abū Dāwūd 1495 and an-Nasāʼī 1300, and by His Greatest Name, bi-smihi l-aʻẓam, at at-Tirmidhī 3544 and Ibn Mājah 3858. Al-badīʻ said of Allah is only in the list at at-Tirmidhī 3507, ḍaʻīf (Aḥmad Shākir; al-Albānī; Darussalam), gharīb by at-Tirmidhī; Ibn Mājah 3861 does not have it. Name 58, al-Mubdiʼ, is b-d-ʼ, a different root.

Story

The naturalist Suhayla spent forty-two years cataloguing the fauna of the eastern islands and never got over the first month.

Her training had given her a set of expectations about what an animal is. The islands ignored them. There was a thing on the northern shore that took four years to classify because it belonged to no order anyone had described, and in the end an order was written for it, containing one member. There was a fish that farmed. Every time she settled on a rule, the next valley produced something that had never read it.

The one that ate stone was the size of a thumbnail and lived on a single cliff on a single island. She spent her first year trying to understand how it could possibly digest limestone. She dissolved cliff fragments in acid, examined them under glass, compared them against samples from the island’s other faces. The limestone was ordinary. But the creature was not eating the limestone.

It took her another year to see what it was doing. It was feeding on a film that grew across the stone, so thin it was barely a stain and so exactly the color of the cliff that it read as cliff. And the film was itself an animal, with no relatives anywhere she had surveyed. She brought the evidence to a colleague who told her she had misread her samples. She went back to the island and brought more. He said it remained unlikely. She stopped trying to convince him and kept the specimen jar on her desk for the rest of her career.

The fish that farmed was half the length of her finger and lived in a tidal pool on the western coast. It grew a single species of algae in a small territory it defended against all comers, weeding out competitors the way a gardener weeds, harvesting in a pattern she could only call deliberate. It had no brain adequate to deliberate. She wrote in her notebook that she did not know what adequate meant in that sentence, and left the problem there.

What struck her was not variety, which she had expected, but invention — answers to the problem of living that did not follow from anything, that owed no part to a previous design. A thousand answers to the same question and no repetition among them. Her colleagues thought it eccentric that she never named the stone-film after herself. She told one of them that she had not made it. She had walked up to it.

The jar is still on the desk. There is a label on it in her handwriting, with the date, and the cliff, and the island, and a number she assigned it herself — and after that a blank, ruled and waiting, where the name would go.

Poem

Every human invention is a recombination.
The wing was studied for centuries
before anyone built one out of canvas.
The camera does what the eye did first —
a design already sitting in every living skull,
already working, already old.

Look hard at anything a person has made
and you will find, underneath it, a joint:
the seam where existing pieces were fitted
into an arrangement nobody had tried.
Combination, not creation.
Nothing anyone has made
was made without something to make it from.

Even the most original painting on earth
was built from pigments that were already here,
shapes seen somewhere first,
a grammar of color and form
the painter inherited
before ever lifting a brush.

Al-Mubdiʼ begins: He made the first mark,
where there was no earlier mark to copy.
Al-Badīʻ originates without a catalogue —
no inherited wing to study, no eye to imitate,
no grammar of shape or color anywhere
to be remixed into something new.

He borrowed no part.
He worked from nothing that was lying there,
because nothing was lying there.
What He originated was the first pattern
that was ever
a pattern
at all.

Reflection

The Origination

Human imagination is a magnificent engine, and it is an engine of combination. We invent monsters by welding together animals we have already seen. We invent machines by rearranging mechanics the world was already running on. Ask anyone to picture a color they have never seen — not an unusual one, a genuinely new one — and they cannot do it; the mind reaches into the drawer it was issued and finds only what was put there. Ask for a shape unrelated to space and nothing arrives at all. Our most breathtaking inventions are brilliant arrangements of a vocabulary we were handed. Not one of us has ever added a word to it.

A thousand years ago in Cairo, Ibn al-Haytham wrote his Book of Optics. He studied a darkened room with a small opening, al-bayt al-muẓlim, the dark chamber, and the image of the eclipsed sun that the opening cast onto the far wall; every camera since works by that same passage of light through an opening. Notice what came first. Before anyone darkened a room, the eye was already a dark chamber with an opening, casting its image inward, and it was Kepler, centuries later, who showed how that image forms at the back of the eye. That is the ceiling of human making: to find, late, a design that was already working. Every camera on earth does what was already looking out of your face before you were born — already working, already old.

Al-Badīʻ is the Originator of the vocabulary itself. Not the arranger of colors, but the One who made there be color. The Qurʼan gives the Name twice and both times inside an argument — Badīʻu s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ, Originator of the heavens and the earth — and at 6:101 the verse presses straight on: How could He have a son, when He has no companion? The Name is set against our instinct to give Him relations, precedents, a category to belong to. At 2:117 the manner follows: When He decrees a matter, He only says to it: Be — and it is. No workshop. No model to copy. No labor and no delay. A word, and a thing that had never existed exists.

The root then does something unnerving on its way through the language. From b-d-ʻ comes ibdāʻ, beginning a thing with no model before it — and from the same three letters, Ibn Fāris says, comes bidʻah, innovation, against which the Prophet ﷺ warned in the plainest terms in the sermon Jābir preserved: the worst of affairs are the newly invented ones, and every innovation is a going astray (Muslim 867a). The two meanings are not in tension. They are one meaning read from the two sides of the line between Creator and servant. Origination is His work, and so entirely His work that when a servant reaches for it in the one domain that is His alone to legislate, the word for the act becomes the word for the error. In the workshop, invent freely. In the religion, follow. The whole of the Name is in that distinction.

So make things. Combine what you have been handed in ways nobody has combined it, and do it well — the work is honest, and it is not diminished by being derivative, because there is no other kind of human work. Only keep the wonder in its right place. When something beautiful is made, the credit that goes to the maker is small change: the maker had a spectrum to choose from, a language to build in, hands that already worked, a mind already furnished before it ever had an idea. Marvel less at the cleverness of the arrangement, and more at the staggering fact that there is anything at all to arrange — that color exists, that sound exists, that the raw material of every imagination that will ever live was set here first, by One who was working with nothing whatever, and had nothing to copy.

Admire the arrangement if you like — but the vocabulary was the miracle, and Al-Badīʻ set down every word of it with nothing whatever to copy.

Qurʼan

بَدِيعُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۖ وَإِذَا قَضَىٰ أَمْرًا فَإِنَّمَا يَقُولُ لَهُ كُن فَيَكُونُ

Originator of the heavens and the earth. When He decrees a matter, He only says to it: Be — and it is.

2:117 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

The answer to 2:116, where they said Allah has taken a son. Aṭ-Ṭabarī: badīʻ is mubdiʻ, a mufʻil turned to faʻīl as muʼlim to alīm and musmiʻ to samīʻ, the one who brings into being what no one before brought into being the like of, and He brought the heavens and the earth into being without origin or model; the One who originated them originated al-Masīḥ without a father. He gives ar-Rabīʻ, He originated their creating and none shared in it, and as-Suddī, nothing was created before them to be a model. Of kun he records four readings and prefers that the existence of what Allah wills neither comes before His command nor after it, as the dead come out of their graves at His call (30:25). Al-Qurṭubī records this as his choice and Ibn ʻAṭiyyah’s weakening of it as an error of sense; Ibn ʻĀshūr, with az-Zamakhsharī, takes the saying as a likening of the speed with which things come to be when will and power attach to them, and cites for it the verse of Abū n-Najm that aṭ-Ṭabarī gives for the view he rejects, that there is no saying there. As-Saʻdī: He made them firm and fine, with no model before, and nothing resists Him. Ibn Kathīr: creating them with no model before, with Mujāhid and as-Suddī, which is what the language requires; he quotes aṭ-Ṭabarī’s gloss and calls it good speech and sound wording. Al-Qurṭubī takes the word on its form: badīʻ is the intensive pattern, its agent noun is mubdiʻ as baṣīr answers to mubṣir, and to originate a thing is to bring it about from no model, so that Allah is the one who raises the heavens and the earth into being and invents them upon no limit and no model; anyone who brings about what was not reached before him is called mubdiʻ, and the innovation is called by the same word because the one who says it originated it without the deed or the saying of an imam. Ibn ʻĀshūr derives the word twice over, either from the simple verb or from the fourth form, the second being the rarer pattern, for which he cites lines of ʻAmr ibn Maʻdī Karib and Kaʻb ibn Zuhayr, and he reports az-Zamakhsharī’s third, that badīʻ is a standing quality, the originality His, as a poet is called badīʻ in his poetry; and he gives the originating its instances, the heavens, the earth, the first man and the order of generation, each of them an origination. Al-Baghawī: the one who originates them and raises them into being from no model that went before.

بَدِيعُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۖ أَنَّىٰ يَكُونُ لَهُ وَلَدٌ وَلَمْ تَكُن لَّهُ صَاحِبَةٌ

Originator of the heavens and the earth. How could He have a son, when He has no companion?

6:101 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

After 6:100, where they ascribed to Him sons and daughters without knowledge. Aṭ-Ṭabarī: badīʻ is the one who originated them and brought them into being after they were not; a child comes only from male and female, and there is no consort for Allah, the Creator of everything. Ibn Kathīr gives badīʻ, with Mujāhid and as-Suddī, as with no model before, and says the bidʻah is so named because it has no like in what went before; a child is born of two matched things, and nothing of His creation matches Him. Al-Qurṭubī glosses it as the one who originated the two and asks from that how a child could be allowed Him; he takes the word as the predicate of an understood subject, records al-Kisāʼī’s allowing of two other case endings, and says the Basrans hold the second an error, an agent noun of past sense not governing. Ibn ʻĀshūr reads the sentence as an argument against them in their own terms: they claimed sonship for the unseen among creatures for the greatness they gave them, and the heavens and the earth they can see are greater and were never so claimed. He reads the two clauses after it as two further refutations: no consort, which is the condition of begetting, meets their claim by counter-argument, and His creating everything answers it universally after the particular, since whatever is created is no child. Al-Baghawī and as-Saʻdī keep the same sense, that He originated them upon no model that went before, as-Saʻdī adding that no mind of the discerning could propose the like of that making and that He had no partner in it.

قُلْ مَا كُنْتُ بِدْعًا مِنَ الرُّسُلِ وَمَا أَدْرِي مَا يُفْعَلُ بِي وَلَا بِكُمْ ۖ إِنْ أَتَّبِعُ إِلَّا مَا يُوحَىٰ إِلَيَّ وَمَا أَنَا إِلَّا نَذِيرٌ مُبِينٌ

Say: I am not the first of the messengers, and I do not know what will be done with me or with you. I only follow what is revealed to me, and I am only a clear warner.

46:9 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

Said to the Prophet ﷺ, for the idolaters of Quraysh. Aṭ-Ṭabarī: I was not the first of the messengers Allah sent to His creation, and many were sent before me; one says huwa bidʻun and badīʻun in a matter when he is the first in it. He gives Ibn ʻAbbās, lastu bi-awwali r-rusul, and Mujāhid and Qatādah to the same effect. Ibn Fāris cites the verse under the root’s first origin: mā kuntu awwal. Four of the other five say what aṭ-Ṭabarī says of the word; Ibn Kathīr gives it from Ibn ʻAbbās, Mujāhid and Qatādah and adds that aṭ-Ṭabarī and Ibn Abī Ḥātim relate nothing else. Al-Baghawī: bidʻ here is badīʻ, of the pattern of niṣf and naṣīf, its plural abdāʻ, and the sense is that he is not the first sent, many having been sent before him, so how is his message denied. Al-Qurṭubī gives the same pattern and the same sense from Ibn ʻAbbās and others, adds ʻIkrimah’s reading with the middle letter opened, which he takes as a governed noun left out, meaning one possessed of a thing newly begun, and gathers the usage of the root around it: a poet originates when he brings what is new, a thing is bidʻ when it is newly begun, a man is bidʻ in a matter when he is first in it, and al-Akhfash gives abdāʻ for the plural of such people, with a line of ʻAdī ibn Zayd from Quṭrub. Ibn ʻĀshūr gives the word as badīʻ by the pattern of khiff for khafīf, with a line of Imruʼ al-Qays, and reads it otherwise than the rest: a standing quality in the sense of bādiʻ, al-Badīʻ, the creator and inventor of things, being among the Names of Allah, so that the sense is I was not one who brought what was not among the messengers. As-Saʻdī: I am not the first messenger to come to you, that you should find my message strange.

وَرَهْبَانِيَّةً ابْتَدَعُوهَا مَا كَتَبْنَاهَا عَلَيْهِمْ إِلَّا ابْتِغَاءَ رِضْوَانِ اللَّهِ

And monasticism they originated — We did not prescribe it for them — except in seeking the pleasure of Allah.

57:27 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

Of those who followed ʻĪsā son of Maryam. Aṭ-Ṭabarī glosses ibtadaʻūhā as aḥdathūhā, they introduced it, and mā katabnāhā as We did not make that monasticism obligatory on them. Ibn Kathīr gives two readings of the exception, that they intended the pleasure of Allah by it (Saʻīd ibn Jubayr, Qatādah) or that He prescribed for them only the seeking of His pleasure, and reads the verse’s close as blame on two counts, for originating in the religion of Allah what He did not command and for not keeping what they took on; as-Saʻdī says the same. Name 83 carries the verse’s opening, raʼfah and raḥmah. Ibn ʻĀshūr settles the grammar of the two halves and so the sense: the word for monasticism is governed by a verb left out, on the pattern of the busied construction, and it is not coordinated on the tenderness and the mercy before it, because what was originated was not of what Allah laid down for them, so it cannot be an object of the verb that put those two in the hearts. Al-Baghawī parses it the same way, and al-Qurṭubī calls it the better parsing, from Abū ʻAlī and az-Zajjāj, and records the other. He glosses originating as bringing what was not known, and an innovation as what is brought in after the one who brought the law, and takes the exception as disjoined yet governed by the verb of prescribing, so that what was prescribed was seeking the pleasure of Allah by every deed and not the monasticism itself, and allows besides an omitted verb, that they originated it seeking His pleasure. Al-Qurṭubī reads the blame as falling on the not keeping rather than on the originating, and draws from the verse that one who originates a good thing should keep to it and not turn from it, citing Abū Umāmah al-Bāhilī, who argued from this very verse that the night prayer of Ramaḍān, once taken up, should not be left. Ibn ʻĀshūr reads the verse as evidence that what is newly begun divides into the praised and the blamed, and cites the saying of ʻUmar on the gathering for that prayer; al-Qurṭubī does both at 2:117, not here.

Dua

اللَّهُمَّ إِنِّي أَسْأَلُكَ بِأَنَّ لَكَ الْحَمْدَ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا أَنْتَ الْمَنَّانُ بَدِيعُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ يَا ذَا الْجَلَالِ وَالْإِكْرَامِ

O Allah, I ask You, since to You belongs all praise — there is no god but You, the Ever-Giving, Originator of the heavens and the earth — O Possessor of Majesty and Generosity.

Abū Dāwūd 1495 · ṣaḥīḥ (al-Albānī; Shuʻayb al-Arnaʼūṭ; Muḥammad Muḥyī ad-Dīn ʻAbd al-Ḥamīd); isnād ḥasan (Darussalam)

From Anas: a man praying called on Allah with this, and the Prophet ﷺ said he had called on Allah bi-smihi l-ʻaẓīm, by His Mighty Name, by which He answers when He is called and gives when He is asked. An-Nasāʼī 1300 has it by the same route, through Khalaf ibn Khalīfah from Anas’s nephew Ḥafṣ: ṣaḥīḥ (Abū Ghuddah; al-Albānī); isnād ṣaḥīḥ (Darussalam). The reading bi-smihi l-aʻẓam, His Greatest Name, is at-Tirmidhī 3544, given below among the ḥadīth, and Ibn Mājah 3858. Names 85 and 41 carry the same supplication.

Hadith

اللَّهُمَّ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا أَنْتَ الْمَنَّانُ بَدِيعُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ذَا الْجَلَالِ وَالْإِكْرَامِ … تَدْرُونَ بِمَ دَعَا اللَّهَ دَعَا اللَّهَ بِاسْمِهِ الْأَعْظَمِ الَّذِي إِذَا دُعِيَ بِهِ أَجَابَ وَإِذَا سُئِلَ بِهِ أَعْطَى

O Allah, there is no god but You, the Ever-Giving, Originator of the heavens and the earth, Possessor of Majesty and Generosity … Do you know by what he called upon Allah? He called upon Allah by His Greatest Name, by which He answers when He is called and gives when He is asked.

at-Tirmidhī 3544 · gharīb (at-Tirmidhī’s own verdict); ṣaḥīḥ (Aḥmad Shākir; al-Albānī; Darussalam)

From Anas: the Prophet ﷺ entered the mosque while a man who had prayed was supplicating. Of its chain at-Tirmidhī says gharīb from the ḥadīth of Thābit from Anas, and that it is reported from Anas by another route. Ibn Mājah 3858, from Anas through Anas ibn Sīrīn, adds waḥdaka lā sharīka lak and says he asked Allah by His Greatest Name: ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ (al-Albānī); isnād ḥasan (Darussalam). Abū Dāwūd 1495, the duʻāʼ above, reads His Mighty Name. A supplication for keeping the Qurʼan that opens allāhumma badīʻa s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ, at-Tirmidhī 3570, is graded mawḍūʻ (Aḥmad Shākir; al-Albānī), ḥasan (Bashshār ʻAwwād Maʻrūf), ḍaʻīf (Darussalam).

وَشَرُّ الْأُمُورِ مُحْدَثَاتُهَا وَكُلُّ بِدْعَةٍ ضَلَالَةٌ

And the worst of affairs are the newly invented ones, and every innovation is a going astray.

Muslim 867a · ṣaḥīḥ

From Jābir ibn ʻAbdillāh: when the Prophet ﷺ gave the sermon his eyes reddened and his voice rose, and he said the best speech is the Book of Allah and the best guidance the guidance of Muḥammad. Muslim 867b gives it as his Friday sermon and the rest like it. Ibn Mājah 45 is the same report: ṣaḥīḥ (al-Albānī; Shuʻayb al-Arnaʼūṭ); ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (Darussalam). Jābir’s report at an-Nasāʼī 1578, by the same route, has wa-kulla muḥdathatin bidʻah between the two clauses: ṣaḥīḥ (Abū Ghuddah; al-Albānī); ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (Darussalam); so does the report of al-ʻIrbāḍ ibn Sāriyah at Abū Dāwūd 4607: ṣaḥīḥ (al-Albānī; Muḥammad Muḥyī ad-Dīn ʻAbd al-Ḥamīd); isnād ṣaḥīḥ (Darussalam). Not a naming of the Name: Ibn Fāris derives al-bidʻah from b-d-ʻ, and Ibn Kathīr at 2:117 and 6:101 names it from badīʻ, a thing introduced with no like before it; at 2:117 he divides it into the bidʻah of the religion and the bidʻah of language.

Study Notes

Verified — construct form attested

ShowHide the Study Notes (2,928 words)

CARRIED ON THIS PAGE: four verses. Kept, with the Arabic unchanged and the notes rewritten: 2:117 and 6:101, badīʻu s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ. Appended: 46:9, qul mā kuntu bidʻan mina r-rusul, new to the book; and 57:27 from wa-rahbāniyyatan ibtadaʻūhā to riḍwāni llāh, another portion of the verse Name 83 carries in its raʼfah clause, linked both ways. Duʻāʼ: Abū Dāwūd 1495, shared exactly with Name 85 and linked to Name 41. Ḥadīth: at-Tirmidhī 3544, new to the book, where a second copy of Abū Dāwūd 1495 stood; and Muslim 867a.

NAMED HERE BUT NOT CARRIED ON THIS PAGE: 30:25, carried at Name 63; 6:100, carried at Name 78; 19:4, 19:48 and 2:116, all carried at NO Name.

CORRECTED ON THE RECORD, THE COUNT: the entry had none, and said only that the definite form does not occur. B-d-ʻ counted on the pointed Tanzil text with the pause marks removed (count_bda.py, every word given one sense and asserted in build_N95.py). Bāʼ, dāl and ʻayn in that order, at most two letters between each, return six words, and a window of six letters returns the same six. Two are bi-duʻāʼ, of d-ʻ-w, at 19:4 and 19:48. Four are b-d-ʻ, in four verses: badīʻ, of Allah, in construct, at 2:117 and 6:101; bidʻan at 46:9, where the Prophet ﷺ says he is not the first of the messengers; ibtadaʻūhā at 57:27, of those who followed ʻĪsā. No verb of the first or fourth form stands in the Qurʼan. The definite al-badīʻ is in no āyah, and neither is al-mubdiʼ; b-d-ʼ, which the sweep does not reach because its third letter differs, has fifteen words in fourteen verses, as Name 58 counts. Every word of b-d-ʻ is now carried in the book.

CORRECTED ON THE RECORD, THE PAGE: FOUND FALSE AND CORRECTED — the ḥadīth note said wa-kullu muḥdathatin bidʻah belongs to another transmitted wording and not to this report; Jābir’s report by the same route has it at an-Nasāʼī 1578, and Muslim’s wording does not. The Muslim 867a portion was vowelled wa-sharra and wa-kulla where the record reads wa-sharru and wa-kullu. The ref said the Prophet ﷺ identified the supplication of Abū Dāwūd 1495 with Allah’s greatest Name; that record reads bi-smihi l-ʻaẓīm, His Mighty Name, and bi-smihi l-aʻẓam is at-Tirmidhī 3544 and Ibn Mājah 3858. The 2:117 note said the command precedes the thing it addresses; aṭ-Ṭabarī records four readings and prefers that what Allah wills neither comes before His command nor after it. The ref said 46:9 denies unprecedentedness to any creature; aṭ-Ṭabarī reads it of the Prophet ﷺ, the first of the messengers denied. The meditation gave ibdāʻ as origination from nothing, where Ibn Fāris has beginning a thing with no model. The meditation said Ibn al-Haytham discovered the eye’s method and then built a box that did the same thing, and the poem said the camera copied the eye; in what was seen the dark chamber was studied as light through an opening, the image of the eclipsed sun on the wall, and the eye was explained by it later, so the poem’s line now reads the camera does what the eye did first and the meditation says so in prose. The meditation’s quotations of 6:101, 2:117 and Muslim 867a are now in the book’s English, the last with its number. REMOVED AS UNVERIFIED — the desc’s no material, no instrument, and He summons what does not yet exist; the 2:117 note’s no template is implied; the 6:101 note’s argument from origination to no partner, now given as aṭ-Ṭabarī and Ibn Kathīr give it, from His creating everything; the meditation’s nobody before him had proved that light enters the eye, Latin received al-bayt al-muẓlim as camera obscura, no material, and the One before whom there was no space to build in; the ḥadīth note’s name for that other wording. The same record, Abū Dāwūd 1495, stood as both duʻāʼ and ḥadīth; the ḥadīth is now at-Tirmidhī 3544, which carries the Greatest Name. The citations Sunan Abī Dāwūd 1495 in the ref and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 867a in the ḥadīth source now read Abū Dāwūd 1495 and Muslim 867a; the ref’s quotation marks are gone. SOURCED — the gloss and the root field are Ibn Fāris’s; the bidʻah on this page rests on Ibn Fāris, who derives it from the root, and on Ibn Kathīr at 2:117 and 6:101; the Friday of the sermon is Muslim 867b, which gives the rest like 867a.

THE SIX EDITIONS: badīʻ in six records, all read. The supplication with al-mannānu badīʻu s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ: Abū Dāwūd 1495 (ṣaḥīḥ, al-Albānī, Muḥammad Muḥyī ad-Dīn ʻAbd al-Ḥamīd and Shuʻayb al-Arnaʼūṭ; isnād ḥasan, Darussalam) and an-Nasāʼī 1300 (ṣaḥīḥ, Abū Ghuddah and al-Albānī; isnād ṣaḥīḥ, Darussalam), both from Khalaf ibn Khalīfah from Ḥafṣ from Anas, both bi-smihi l-ʻaẓīm; at-Tirmidhī 3544 (ṣaḥīḥ, Aḥmad Shākir, al-Albānī and Darussalam; gharīb by at-Tirmidhī) and Ibn Mājah 3858 (ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ, al-Albānī; isnād ḥasan, Darussalam), both bi-smihi l-aʻẓam. In a supplication for keeping the Qurʼan, allāhumma badīʻa s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ twice, at-Tirmidhī 3570: mawḍūʻ (Aḥmad Shākir; al-Albānī), ḥasan (Bashshār ʻAwwād Maʻrūf), ḍaʻīf (Darussalam). The definite al-badīʻ, of Allah, only in the list at at-Tirmidhī 3507, an-nūru l-hādī l-badīʻu l-bāqī: ḍaʻīf (Aḥmad Shākir; al-Albānī; Darussalam), gharīb by at-Tirmidhī; Ibn Mājah 3861 does not have it. The clause kullu bidʻatin ḍalālah in six records: Muslim 867a; Ibn Mājah 45, the same report (ṣaḥīḥ, al-Albānī and Shuʻayb al-Arnaʼūṭ; ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Darussalam); an-Nasāʼī 1578, from Jābir by the same route, with kullu muḥdathatin bidʻah and kullu ḍalālatin fī n-nār (ṣaḥīḥ, Abū Ghuddah and al-Albānī; ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Darussalam); Abū Dāwūd 4607, from al-ʻIrbāḍ ibn Sāriyah, with kullu muḥdathatin bidʻah (ṣaḥīḥ, al-Albānī and Muḥammad Muḥyī ad-Dīn ʻAbd al-Ḥamīd; isnād ṣaḥīḥ, Darussalam); Ibn Mājah 42, from al-ʻIrbāḍ (ṣaḥīḥ, al-Albānī and Shuʻayb al-Arnaʼūṭ; isnād ḥasan, Darussalam); Ibn Mājah 46, from Ibn Masʻūd, with kullu muḥdathatin bidʻah (ḍaʻīf, al-Albānī and Darussalam). Ubdiʻa bī, the root’s second origin, stands at Muslim 1893a, Abū Dāwūd 5129 and at-Tirmidhī 2671, and the three are now read whole. They are one report and not three witnesses: Abū Masʻūd al-Anṣārī, whom at-Tirmidhī names al-Badrī and calls ʻUqbah ibn ʻAmr, through al-Aʻmash from Abū ʻAmr ash-Shaybānī, whom at-Tirmidhī names Saʻd ibn Iyās. A man came asking to be carried and said ubdiʻa bī, his mount having broken down under him; the answer in Muslim is that there was nothing to carry him on, and in Abū Dāwūd and at-Tirmidhī the naming of a man who might, and the report closes on whoever points to a good having the like of the reward of the one who does it, at-Tirmidhī noting that his teacher wavered between doer and worker and that a second chain has it without the wavering. So the root’s second origin, the being cut off and left exhausted, stands in the six in this one report and in the mouth of a man describing his beast, which is the sense Ibn Fāris gives it. Abū Dāwūd’s rows: ṣaḥīḥ (al-Albānī; Muḥammad Muḥyī ad-Dīn ʻAbd al-Ḥamīd; Shuʻayb al-Arnaʼūṭ), and Zubair ʻAlī Zaʼī refers it to Muslim; at-Tirmidhī’s: his own ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ, with ṣaḥīḥ from Aḥmad Shākir and al-Albānī and ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ from Bashshār ʻAwwād Maʻrūf, and Zubair ʻAlī Zaʼī refers it to Muslim. Muslim 867a and at-Tirmidhī 3544 are contained letter for letter.

READ: Ibn Fāris, Maqāyīs al-Lughah, the entry b-d-ʻ whole, vol. 1, pp. 209–210, and the close of b-d-ʼ, p. 213, on Shamela. Aṭ-Ṭabarī at 2:117 (the gloss, al-Masīḥ without a father, and the four readings of kun), 6:101, 46:9 and 57:27; Ibn Kathīr at 2:117 from badīʻ to kun, at 6:101, at 46:9 the bidʻan paragraph, and at 57:27 to fa-mā raʻawhā; as-Saʻdī at 2:117. For the history, search results only, no page opened: historyofinformation.com on al-bayt al-muẓlim and the eclipse; the MIT Press listing of Ibn al-Haytham’s On the Shape of the Eclipse, the first experimental study of the camera obscura; MedCrave, 2019, on Leonardo, della Porta and Kepler; muslimheritage.com on Ibn al-Haytham on eye and brain, on Kepler and the image at the back of the eye.

NOT READ: al-Mujmal, ar-Rāghib, Lisān al-ʻArab and al-Khalīl for b-d-ʻ in print.

OPEN: whether Ibn al-Haytham himself compared the dark chamber to the eye, which muslimheritage.com says; MedCrave, a review of Lindberg’s Theories of Vision and an encyclopaedia read on the web give the likening to Leonardo, and della Porta after him; the Book of Optics itself is not reached. The poem’s wing studied for centuries before anyone built one out of canvas, not checked, kept. The poem’s Al-Mubdiʼ made the first mark where there was no earlier mark to copy gives Name 58 the no-model sense Ibn Fāris gives b-d-ʻ, the tension Name 58 records for its own meditation and poem; kept. The story’s fish that farms, its film on the stone that is an animal, and its fish with no brain adequate to deliberate, are the invented fauna of invented islands, not looked for in any source; kept.

COHERENCE: the desc, the ref and the notes give the same four words, the same two origins of Ibn Fāris and the same Mighty and Greatest Name readings under the same numbers; the meditation quotes 6:101, 2:117 and Muslim 867a in the book’s English and names Ibn Fāris for bidʻah; the story is unchanged; Name 58 names this Name as a different root, and this page names Name 58 back. AFTER THE CHAT-END AUDIT OF 81–85: the grade field of Abū Dāwūd 1495 now gives every grader in the dataset’s rows, each attributed to its record (the grade survey).

ON THE AUTHOR’S LIST, THE RECORDED GROUP: the list gathers in one place the passages of the creative pages that are the author’s own and are kept, so that no later pass corrects them. The entries at this Name are the lines of POEMS 95 that were not checked and are kept, and the invented fauna of CH 95. This note already records them; that record stands, the passages are unchanged, and they stay with him.

ON THE AUTHOR’S LIST, THE TITLE AND THE RENDERINGS: Name 85 now reads The Lord of Majesty and Honour while the āyāt, the supplications and the reports still read Possessor of Majesty and Generosity. All twenty places were found and weighed one at a time, and every one of them is the book’s own rendering of a verse or of a report and not the book’s own prose; so none of them follows the title, nothing was changed, and whether that English should follow the title stays with the author. At this Name they are Abū Dāwūd 1495 on the Duʻāʼ page and at-Tirmidhī 3544 on the Ḥadīth page. AFTER THE TAFSĪR READING AT NAME 95: the commentators the line above left unread are read, and that line no longer stands as it did. All six were swept for b-d-ʻ at every one of the four entries of this page and every passage carrying the root was read at each, so that al-Qurṭubī, al-Baghawī and Ibn ʻĀshūr, who had been read at no verse of this Name, are now read at all four, and as-Saʻdī at all four as well. Nothing on the page was found false and no claim came off it. What the reading gives the notes, in order: at 2:117 al-Qurṭubī takes the Name on its form, the intensive pattern whose agent noun is mubdiʻ, and Ibn ʻĀshūr derives it twice over, from the simple verb or from the fourth form, giving two lines of verse for the rarer of the two, which is the first grammatical account of the Name’s own word anywhere on this page; at 6:101 al-Qurṭubī records al-Kisāʼī’s two other case endings and the Basran refusal of the second; at 46:9 three more of the six say what the note has from aṭ-Ṭabarī alone, that the word there is badīʻ, two of them by the pattern of niṣf and naṣīf and Ibn ʻĀshūr by khiff and khafīf, and al-Qurṭubī adds ʻIkrimah’s reading with the middle letter opened and gathers the usage of the root around the verse; and at 57:27 Ibn ʻĀshūr settles the grammar in a way that bears on Name 83 as well as on this one, since the word for monasticism is governed by a verb left out and is not coordinated on the tenderness and the mercy that Name 83 carries from the same verse, precisely because what was originated was not laid down for them, while al-Qurṭubī reads the blame as falling on the not keeping rather than on the originating. One thing bearing on an item this record leaves open and does not close: the reason al-Mujmal gives for the naming of the innovation, which this record could see only quoted in an editor’s footnote, is given word for word by al-Qurṭubī in his own text, that the one who says it originated it without the deed or the saying of an imam. That is an independent witness to the reason; it does not settle which of Ibn Fāris’s two origins his own words mean, and the open item stands. What is still owed at this Name is the full entry rather than the root passage at each of the four, and ar-Rāghib, Lisān al-ʻArab and al-Khalīl at the root; Names 96 and 97 stand where the reading list leaves them, with their files downloaded and unread. AFTER THE ḤADĪTH READING: the three records that carry ubdiʻa bī were read whole and proved to be one report by one chain, so the line above no longer says they were not read; what they give is written into it. Nothing on the page changed.

IN BUILD 196, FROM THE BACKLOG READING OF THE LEXICA: ar-Rāghib (al-Mufradāt, p. 110), Lisān al-ʻArab (vol. 8, p. 6) and al-Khalīl (al-ʻAyn, vol. 2, p. 54) are read at Shamela through its page reader, not in print, for b-d-ʻ: ibdāʻ is making without a model, and said of Allah it is bringing into being without instrument, matter, time or place; Lisān gives al-Badīʻ as the creator who invents with no model before; al-Khalīl gives al-badʻ as bringing about what had no making, mention or knowledge before; nothing on this page is at odds with them, and the NOT READ line owes them only in print; the notes no longer describe their own reading or this page. IN BUILD 198, FROM THE BACKLOG READING OF THE TAFSĪR: the six entries at 2:117 and 6:101 are read whole from the pinned dataset, and every attribution the two notes made holds; Ibn Kathīr, aṭ-Ṭabarī’s account of the form with ar-Rabīʻ and as-Suddī, the two readings of kun that differ from his, az-Zamakhsharī’s derivation and Ibn ʻĀshūr’s three refutations are given; the NOT READ line owes 46:9 and 57:27. IN BUILD 199, FROM THE BACKLOG READING OF THE TAFSĪR: the six entries at 46:9 and 57:27 are read whole from the pinned dataset, so that each entry of the page is read whole in all six; at 46:9 four of the other five, not three, give aṭ-Ṭabarī’s sense, and Ibn ʻĀshūr alone reads the word as the originator’s quality; at 57:27 Ibn Kathīr’s blame is on two counts, and Ibn ʻĀshūr’s exception is given as he reads it, with the omitted verb as the reading he allows; the reports of the sects and of the monasticism of this community that the commentators carry at 57:27 are not given; the NOT READ line owes no tafsīr entry. IN BUILD 204, FROM THE ḤADĪTH AND PHASE 2 READINGS: at-Tirmidhī 2671 has fāʻilihi aw qāla ʻāmilihi with no one named as the one who wavered, and after a second chain says it is without the wavering; the record above gives the wavering to his teacher, which at-Tirmidhī does not say, and keeps its words (A18). The image of the eclipsed sun the meditation speaks of is the subject of Ibn al-Haytham’s On the Shape of the Eclipse, described in its 2016 critical edition as the first scientific analysis of the dark chamber, read on the web and not in print; the Book of Optics’ own account of the dark chamber and Kepler’s part are not read; the meditation is the author’s and is unchanged.

IN BUILD 207, FROM THE READING OF THE GRADES: Muḥammad Fuʼād ʻAbd al-Bāqī is no longer named as a grader on this page: the row the ḥadīth dataset gives in his name is al-Albānī’s ruling as it is printed with ʻAbd al-Bāqī’s edition of Ibn Mājah, read at Shamela through its page reader, not in print, and the edition gives no verdict of its own beyond quoting az-Zawāʼid; al-Albānī’s grade stands where it stood, and earlier records keep their words.

IN BUILD 207, FROM THE BACKLOG READING OF THE LEXICA: al-Mujmal is read at Shamela through its page reader, not in print (p. 118): after the examples of both origins it says the bidʻah is so named because the one who says it originated it without the saying of an imam, which is the first origin, making without a model; in the Maqāyīs the sentence follows the second origin’s examples with no reason given, and Hārūn’s note on it quotes al-Mujmal; so Ibn Fāris’s own reason is from the first origin, and the OPEN line no longer asks it. For the dark chamber, a review of Lindberg’s Theories of Vision and an encyclopaedia are read on the web: both give the likening of the eye to the dark chamber to Leonardo, and della Porta after him; nothing read gives it to Ibn al-Haytham, and his Book of Optics is not reached.

الباقيNext · Name 96The Everlasting

Al-Bāqī

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