Shaykh Ahmad's belief about the creation of the universe.

The plane of the Universal Intellect, the first emanation from the divine Will, is also called the One (wahid), since it is on this plane that number and specification first appear. On this plane God pronounces nineteen letters, creating the lower nineteen levels of existence: the nine spheres, the four elements, the three kingdoms of nature, man, jinn, and angels. The nineteen letters form the words, bism Allah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, "In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate", whereby the chapters of the Qur'an begin. This phrase is the universal manifestation of all the levels of contingent being, and for that very reason consists of nineteen letters. When the numerical value of the One (wahid) is added to numerical value of the higher divine plane of Unicity (ahad), the results is equivalent to the letters forming the name kaf, corresponding to the Roman K. The letter kaf, in turn, stands for the Divine Will. It is also the first letter of the Arabic phrase "Be !" (kun) whereby God created the universe. This kaf revolves, and from it emanate all things. A similar discussion occurs in the important treatise of Ibn 'Arabi, The Tree of Being (Shajarat al-Kawn).

...The poetic and dream-like quality of letters as constitutive of the world is immediately apparent, but as cultural constructs they would appear to fail Ricceur's test for the authentic symbol insofar as they lack a cosmic dimension. It is here that the old Greek practice of calling both the elements (earth, air, fire and water) and the letters of the alphabet stoicheia becomes important. For Shaykh Ahmad, as well, the letters are elements, so that letter mysticism in this Greco-Arabic tradition is not only cosmological linguistics but also atomistic physics, and a natural, "cosmic" dimension to the alphabet as symbol can therefore also be discerned.

(Juan R. I. Cole, The World as Text: Cosmologies of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i, Studia Islamica No. 80 (1994), pp. 145-163 Published By Brill)