The muqatta'at: the mystery of the Quran's isolated letters

Twenty-nine suras of the Quran open in an unusual way: not with a sentence, but with one or more letters of the Arabic alphabet pronounced one by one. The second sura, the longest, begins with alif, lam, mim; the twentieth with ta, ha; the thirty-sixth with ya, sin. These sigla are called al-huruf al-muqatta'at, «the separated letters», and for fourteen centuries they have been one of the most discussed riddles of Islamic exegesis.

What they are and how they appear

The combinations range from a single letter, such as sad, qaf and nun, to five, as in the sura of Maryam, which opens with kaf, ha, ya, ayn, sad. Some sequences recur: alif, lam, mim appears at the start of six suras, while ha, mim opens a group of seven consecutive suras, called for this reason hawamim. In recitation the letters are pronounced by their names, not by their sounds.

One fact has struck many commentators. The distinct letters used in the muqatta'at number fourteen, exactly half of the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet. Moreover, most of the suras that begin with these sigla go on with a reference to the Book or to revelation, as if the letters drew attention to the very nature of sacred writing.

The explanations of the exegetes

The great commentator al-Tabari, who died in 923, gathered in his tafsir many opinions attributed to the early Muslims. For some the letters were names of the suras; for others abbreviations of names or attributes of God; for others still oaths, or a way of capturing the listeners' attention. Many scholars, finally, held that their meaning is known only to God and that the believer must accept them without claiming to explain them.

In popular devotion two of these sigla have had a special fate. Ta ha and ya sin have been understood by part of the tradition as names or epithets of the Prophet Muhammad, and they have also become very common personal names. The sura Ya Sin in particular is among the most recited in the Muslim world, often on occasions of mourning.

Mystics, numbers and modern scholars

For the mystics the isolated letters were a gateway to hidden meanings. Ibn Arabi, in the Futuhat al-Makkiyya, devoted lengthy reflections to the science of letters. In the late fourteenth century the Persian Fadlallah Astarabadi founded the movement known as Hurufiyya, which saw in the letters the key to the universe; he was put to death in 1394. Other authors tried to derive figures and dates from the muqatta'at through the numerical values of the abjad, speculations criticised by many scholars.

European orientalists have also proposed hypotheses. The German Theodor Nöldeke suggested in 1860 that the letters were the initials of the owners of the collections from which the text had been formed, but he later abandoned the idea himself. Other scholars have interpreted them as markers grouping the suras or as liturgical elements. No proposal has won general agreement.

The muqatta'at thus remain a rare case: an element of the world's most widely read sacred text whose meaning remains open. For many believers this mystery is not a problem to be solved but a sign that the divine word always contains something that goes beyond human understanding. Each new generation of readers thus returns to question them.