What does it mean that everything was created in pairs?

It means that nothing in creation is complete in itself. Everything has a complementary counterpart, from man and woman down to the smallest particles of matter.

The Holy Qur’an says in several places that God created everything in pairs. With people, animals and plants one thinks at once of male and female. But the Arabic word for pair has a much wider meaning. It refers to a system of complementing. Nothing in creation is complete and independent in itself. Everything has a counterpart that completes it.

This can already be seen at the smallest scale. Every atom seeks to bond with others, and chemistry describes exactly how many bonds an atom can form. All the substances we know arise from this need to be completed. The second verse above even speaks of pairs in things that people at that time did not know at all.

Research has since reached deep into the world of the smallest particles. There it finds the same pattern. Every particle has an antiparticle with the opposite charge, such as the positron for the electron. If everything is added together, in this picture the total comes to zero.

There is a deep thought about creation in this. God created the world from nothing by, as it were, dividing nothing into two separate kinds of existence. Like the two sides of an equation they stand opposite each other, and what we see as the universe is made of them. So pairing is not doubling, where one becomes two and two become four. It is the principle of complementing on which all of creation rests, and the first verse above invites us to reflect on it.