Reed-pen. The first verse of Q. 68 says: ‘By the pen and what they write’ and Q. 96:4 states that God taught man ‘by the pen’. According to some traditions (such as those collected in al-Ṭabarī’s Tafsīr), the qalam was the first thing created by God. Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī (d. after 971) linked the terms qalam and ʿarsh with ʿaql in an attempt to equate Qur’anic concepts with Neoplatonic cosmology.
