Al Awwal

Awwal is first — and the root also carries taʾwīl, the tracing of a thing back to where it started, which is the Qur’an’s word for interpreting. A beginning, in these letters, is something you can return to as well as something you leave.

The written form appears twice and only one of them is the name; the other speaks of the first creation, in Sūrat Qāf. The one that is the name stands in an ayah of Sūrat al-Ḥadīd naming four in a row — the First, the Last, the Outward and the Inward — which then closes by saying He knows all things. Read as a single line, they leave nowhere out.