That hukam derives from the Arabic hukm, a legal or administrative command, is not merely an etymological curiosity; the borrowing reflects the Persian and Islamic vocabulary current in the Punjab of Guru Nanak's time, and comparing how the word functions in its source tradition against how Sikh theology redeploys it clarifies what is distinctively Sikh about the concept.
In Islamic usage, hukm names a specific ruling or legal judgment, God's command in a narrower sense than the Sikh theological usage, and the broader Islamic concept closest to Sikh hukam as a cosmic ordering principle is qadar or taqdir, divine decree or predestination, a doctrine that generated its own extensive theological argument within Islam over the compatibility of decree with human responsibility, addressed elsewhere in this collection in connection with tawakkul and the Ash'ari and Mu'tazili dispute over divine attributes and human acts. Sikh theology took the legal and administrative Persian-Islamic vocabulary of command and decree and redirected it toward a devotional and metaphysical claim closer in function to the Hindu concept of an impersonal cosmic order, though Sikh teaching insists, against a purely impersonal reading, that hukam is the expression of a personal, knowable God rather than a blind mechanism.
The borrowing is one instance of a broader pattern in Guru Nanak's theological vocabulary, which draws freely on both the Sanskritic and Perso-Arabic religious registers current in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Punjab, a linguistic openness some scholars read as an expression of the tradition's founding refusal, stated in Guru Nanak's declaration that there is neither Hindu nor Muslim, to be confined within either vocabulary.