1قُل هُوَ اللَّهُ أَحَدٌMir Ahmed AliSay:1 “He, God, is One (alone).The Jews asked the Holy Prophet to describe the identity or to relate the geneology of God and the Messenger Angel brought this Sura. There is a vast difference between the two Arabic words ‘Ahad’ and ‘Wahid’ both commonly thought to mean Oneness. To indicate the Unity of God, it is said in this verse that God is ‘Ahad’, i.e., One, One in the sense of the Absolute Oneness of His Essential Existence, not in the numerical sense of the numeral which has its second and third but One which has no second of it. The expression one, is in the sense of being the ONLY in conceiving Whose existence all the faculties of the human intellect are helpless. He is such a one that even His attributes are His Essence and not separate and never separable from Him. It is a death-blow, Islam rendered to all imaginary conception of any kind of polytheistic doctrines and the phenomena of plurality about the All/Divine. See 59:22:24. He is One with none comparable to Him, without any beginning or end, Unlimited by time, space or circumstances. A reality before which all others have no existence. He is the Creator, One and everything is His creation.This chapter with all its brevity is considered to contain the gist of the spirit of the Absolute Unity of God which is the fundamental of the fundamentals of the faith, Islam. It is considered that on third of Qur’an is revealed as an explanation to this Synthesis. It is said that the Holy Prophet was asked to give the idea of Godhead which he preached and this Chapter was revealed. It begins with pronoun—third person—Ar. ‘Ho’, i.e., He which refers to something known to all but not identified with any, as against the usual reference in the term of first person singular ‘I’ of the conception of the Absolute in the Aryan creeds—saying the ‘Athma’ and the ‘Brahma’ both are one. For the word Rnv. 1:1—‘Ahad’ for Unity of His Essence, i.e., He is not of composite nature. ‘Samad’ stands to denote that He is all-compact in His Unity in the sense that He cannot be described or defined to be void of any excellence or any excellence to be void of Him. Thus He is all in all in the true sense of the term discarding every possibility of incarnation. Thus proves His all-pervadingness and all/comprehensiveness which means His being infinite—as such the question of His being in the sense of something separated from Him as his issue of His being separated from anybody from any origin, i.e., His being born—does not at all arise—and it is self-evident that there cannot be a second or a match or a rival for such a being. It is unimaginable because the very idea of the existence of two, implies the finiteness and the limitation of both which is contradictory to the very idea of the Absolute unity of the Essence. (A.P.)