Followers of this account will know by now: we are trying to read the Human (the observer), the Cosmos (the observed) and the Qur'an (that which gives meaning) together, and to develop conceptual materials and instruments that might discipline such a reading for the next generation. Comments and questions would clarify these matters and contribute to the effort.

Here we make an introduction — however superficial — to emergence, part and whole, particular and universal, irreducibility and indivisibility. Suppressing our perfectionist instincts, we have committed to writing one more of the dozens of subjects long deferred because “we cannot yet tell it fully.”

Once these concepts are grasped, it becomes easier to see that meaning (malakūt) is more important than matter (mulk), and existentially prior to it. This essay offers a light introduction to escaping the physicalist view: to understanding that prayer, the spirit and a beautiful word are not the result of a configuration of matter but stand at a level of being that shapes the configuration of matter. We also draw a step nearer the view that the world of meaning is not a side effect of the neocortex that evolved for the survival of homo sapiens — rather, matter, and the human in particular, evolved so as to bridge into that world of meaning.

How do simple parts come together and produce something extraordinary? How do individual elements form a whole richer and more meaningful than their own components?

Have you ever baked a cake? Flour, eggs and sugar have little taste on their own. Yet brought together and baked, they turn into something entirely new. This transformation, in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts, is called emergence.

Emergence names the case in which parts, coming together in a particular order, display properties none of them possesses alone. It is like a jigsaw: each piece may look meaningless by itself, yet together a completed picture appears.

These three — emergence, the indivisible whole, and irreducibility — help us understand how parts compose meaningful wholes. Emergence is the creation of a meaning through the coming together of parts; the indivisible whole is that identity and meaning, which vanishes once divided. An irreducible whole or system, even where it can be divided, has a behaviour unaccountable by the separate behaviour of its parts. This is in fact why quantum systems strike us as strange; their difference from classical physics is essentially that we cannot reduce them to more fundamental systems.

In Islamic philosophy juzʾ (part) and kull (whole) explain how parts come together into a completed and meaningful whole. Al-Jurjānī and Nursî use these terms often.

The All-Wise Maker has, by His subtle art, delivered the human from being a sack of chemicals and made the meaning of humanity an indivisible whole. Life is an emergent concept; it appears through a delicate, fine configuration of lifeless chemicals — and this too is a subtle art. As a complex adaptive system the whole becomes, with faith and submission, a universal representing in worship all the individuals of the cosmos — that greater human; it ascends in the prayer and, saying at-taḥiyyātu lillāh, presents within this universal worship the worship of every individual of the cosmos to God.

Understanding how parts compose meaningful wholes deepens our grasp of both science and philosophy. How is it that the relationships in your life create something exceeding their individual parts? Whether the harmony of a symphony, the love of a family, or the majestic design of the cosmos and of life — these ideas teach us that the whole is always greater, richer and more beautiful.

These ideas let us pass beyond the physical world to discover a deeper reality uniting all beings — and to make the acquaintance of the dwellers of the realm of malakūt.