Name Seventy-Three: Al-Awwal — The First, The Beginning

Arabic: ٱلْأَوَّل

Abjad Value: 37

The Name

Al-Awwal is the First. Not first in a list — first in existence. First before there was a before. The root '-w-l means to return to the origin, and this is the secret hidden inside the Name: the First is also the place to which all things return. Al-Awwal is not a starting point that the universe left behind. Al-Awwal is the origin that is still originating — still active, still present, still the ground beneath every moment, the source beneath every event, the beginning that never stopped beginning. You did not come from Al-Awwal the way a train leaves a station. You are coming from Al-Awwal right now. The origination is continuous. The First is not in the past. The First is the deepest layer of the present.

The Qur'an declares: "He is the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Hidden, and He has knowledge of all things" (57:3). Four Names in a single verse — Al-Awwal, Al-Ākhir, Aẓ-Ẓāhir, Al-Bāṭin — and the Sufis understood this as the most complete description of divine reality in the entire scripture. God is the beginning, the end, the outer, and the inner. There is nowhere God is not. There is no time in which God is absent. Al-Awwal claims the origin. Al-Ākhir claims the destination. Between them, every moment of existence is held. Ibn 'Arabi taught that Al-Awwal is not a temporal statement — God did not merely come first in chronological order. Al-Awwal means that God is the ontological ground of all beginning. Nothing begins except through the First. Every birth, every idea, every heartbeat, every sentence you have ever spoken began in Al-Awwal before it began in you. You are not the author of your beginnings. You are the location where Al-Awwal's beginnings become visible.

For the diasporic practitioner, Al-Awwal is the Name that reclaims the origin story. The colonial project told Black people they had no beginning — no history, no civilization, no genesis worth remembering. The Middle Passage was framed as the beginning, as though the African had no existence prior to enslavement. Al-Awwal says: your beginning is before their records. Your origin is before their ships. Your genesis is in the First — in the same divine source that originated the stars, the prophets, the mountains, and the Names themselves. No bill of sale is your origin story. No plantation is your genesis. Al-Awwal is your beginning, and Al-Awwal predates every empire that ever tried to name you as its property.

The Shadow

The first distortion is the person who is addicted to beginnings. They start everything and finish nothing. Every new project, new relationship, new spiritual practice carries the intoxicating energy of genesis — the rush of possibility, the clean slate, the feeling that this time it will be different. But once the beginning fades and the middle arrives with its demands for consistency, discipline, and endurance, they abandon it and chase the next beginning. They have mistaken the energy of Al-Awwal for the whole journey. Al-Awwal initiates. It does not excuse you from the road that follows.

The second distortion is the person who cannot begin. They are paralyzed at the threshold. They research, they plan, they prepare, they wait for perfect conditions — and the beginning never comes because every beginning involves a death. To begin something new is to end the version of yourself that existed before the beginning, and they are not willing to let that version die. They cling to the pre-beginning state because it is safe, because potential is more comfortable than commitment, because the moment you begin you can fail and the moment before you begin you cannot. Al-Awwal does not wait for conditions to be perfect. Al-Awwal speaks the world into existence from nothing — from absolute void, from the darkness before the first light. If the First can begin from nothing, you can begin from where you are.

The Practice

Step one: Breathe. Sit in stillness and take seven breaths. On each exhale, speak the Name — Ya Awwal. With each breath, feel backward — not into memory but into origin. Feel the breath that is breathing you right now and trace it back. Who gave you this body? Who gave them theirs? Follow the thread back through the generations, past the ancestors you can name, past the ones you cannot, past the continent, past the species, past the planet, past the first star, back to the First — to the origin of origins, the beginning of beginnings, the source from which the entire unfolding emerged. You are connected to that source right now. The thread has never been cut. You are still being originated. Al-Awwal is still speaking you into existence with every breath.

Step two: Write. On a piece of paper, write: "What needs to begin in my life that I have been refusing to start?" Name it. Then write: "What am I afraid will die if I begin?" Name that too. Every beginning is a small death — the death of the person who had not yet started. Let the pen reveal what you are protecting by refusing to begin and whether that protection is worth the cost of the unlived beginning.

Step three: Begin one thing today. Not tomorrow. Not after more preparation. Today. It can be small — the first sentence of the book, the first phone call, the first prayer of a new practice, the first honest conversation you have been postponing. Let it be imperfect. Let it be clumsy. Al-Awwal did not create a polished universe on the first day. Al-Awwal created light. Just light. Just the first thing. That was enough to make everything else possible. Begin. Let the beginning be enough.

SI Companion Prompt

"I am working with the divine Name Al-Awwal, The First — the quality of God that is the origin of all origins, the beginning that is still beginning, the source from which every moment of existence continuously emerges. I want to explore my relationship with beginnings — with the things I have been refusing to start and the things I start but cannot sustain past the initial rush. I want to understand what dies when something new begins and why I am protecting the old at the expense of the new. Help me find the beginning that is asking to be born through me right now. What wants to start? And what am I afraid of losing if I let it?"

WE RETURN TO THE ROOT