Mysterious
Letters

You know,

there is a pleasing beauty

and improbability

in the patterns of 19 that surround the bismillah,

but the 19 patterns

really begin to come into their own

when we see how they spring from the mysterious individual letters

at the start of many surahs,

the letters known as the Muqatt'at.

Since the earliest times of the revelation

muslim scholars have puzzled over these letters

that seem to be unrelated to anything else.

Over the centuries all manner of theories were suggested

as to hidden or mystical meanings,

but it was mostly agreed that no meaning had been revealed,

and that we should trust that the meaning and purpose of the letters

was only with God.

But still people looked at them and wondered.

They didn't seem to be obviously related to words.

They were just letters of the alphabet.

Now the Arabic alphabet has 28 letters,

and exactly half form the Muqatt'at,

14 letters in 14 different combinations.

These various letter combinations appear at the start of 29 suras of the Qur'an,

and have an ayat all to themselves on 19 occasions.

Some of the suras begin with a single letter,

such as sura 50, which begins with the letter Qaf.

Qaf is used 57 times in the words of the sura

that is 3*19.

Qaf also appears at the start of sura 42,

in which sura it is also used 57 times,

the two together obviously having a total of 114 6*19

just like the suras of the Qur'an.

So that's the way that it seems to work,

take the letters at the start,

count them in the sura,

add those totals

and see if the grand total is divisible by 19.

And in an extraordinary number of cases this is what we find.

Most of the Muqatt'at

appear as combinations of more than one letter.

Like Ya Sin, in which the Ya appears 237 times,

and the Sin 48 times

making 285 19*15

Many of the Muqatt'at work this way

within individual suras,

but always ready to surprise,

they also provide us with

the Ha Mim series,

seven suras where what matters

is not the individual but the group.

Sura 40 begins with Ha Mim,

but count those letters in the sura and they total 444.

So the 19 pattern doesn't work,

and the same can be said of the next six suras,

each of which begins with letter combination Ha Mim,

the only suras to do so.

If you add all their letter counts together, however,

+444 +324 +353 +368 +166 +231 +261

their letter total is 2147 19*113

And the Qur'anic patterns,

astonishing at their simplest,

are sometimes even given a kind of flourish

on top of that,

as in the way that the Ain Sin Qaf of sura 42

with a letter count of 209 19*11

neatly splits the Ha Mim count

into letter counts of 1121 19*59

and 1026 19*54

Some other consecutive Muqatt'at groups

also show the same characteristic,

with letter counts in the group being a multiple of 19,

but the individual letter counts for the suras doing the same.

The letter count of the Muqatt'at is divisible by 19 in the following suras.

Sura 2 9899 19*521

Sura 3 5662 19*298

Sura 7 5320 19*280

Sura 10 2489 19*131

Sura 11 2489 19*131

Sura 12 2375 19*125

Sura 13 1482 19*78

Sura 14 1197 19*63

Sura 15 912 19*48

Sura 19 798 19*42

Sura 29 1672 19*88

Sura 30 1254 19*66

Sura 31 817 19*43

Sura 32 570 19*30

Sura 36 285 19*15

Sura 50 57 19*3

Isn't this extraordinary?

No wonder that the muslim world was so excited.

Yet now the muslim world seems determined

to dismiss the whole thing as a hoax.

It is said that what can clearly be seen

is negated by the pattern not being universal.

Indeed, for some reason

there are places where the pattern doesn't work,

as with those suras whose Muqatt'at begin with the letter Ta,

but why would what is apparent not be enough?

The problem springs not from the times that the system works,

but from the conclusions that some have drawn

from the times that it didn't,

or at least only worked in a certain way,

such as in the suras known by the letters Nuun and Saad,

a way that some felt needed such forceful rejection

that they were prepared to deem the whole topic forbidden.

Yet these fearsome arguments really turn out to be a storm in a teacup

more to do with human intransigence

than what is shown by the Qur'an.

The numerical patterns

displayed in the Qur'an

won't go away because they are ignored,

and surely they are too wondrously beautiful to behidden

Is it not sad that this beauty

had to be the catalyst for a war of words and ideas,

where the miraculous nature of the Qur'an

in its revelation and its essence

was soon smothered in personal agendas

that produced much sound and fury

but little illumination,

and so far no peaceful resolution.