الٓمٓ
Twenty-nine sūras in the Qurʾān open with letters read out one by one. These are called the ḥurūf muqaṭṭaʿa — the disconnected letters, letters read piece by piece. The recitation itself shows this: this verse is not read "alam" but "alif-lām-mīm", each letter named separately. They are not a word, then, but the letters themselves.
- A total of fourteen distinct letters are used in these groups.
- The Arabic alphabet has twenty-eight letters.
- The letters used are thus exactly half the alphabet.
- These fourteen letters occur at the heads of sūras in fourteen different combinations (alif-lām-mīm, alif-lām-rā, ḥā-mīm, ṭā-hā, yā-sīn, qāf, nūn, ṣād, kāf-hā-yā-ʿayn-ṣād, and so on).
It is not known with certainty. This has to be said at the outset and plainly, because these letters are the places that have produced the most speculation in the history of exegesis.
From the earliest generations onward a group of scholars said that the meaning of these letters belongs to the mutashābih — what must be left to God; sayings of the type "Every book has a secret, and the secret of the Qurʾān is the letters at the heads of the sūras" are transmitted. This stance is not a confession of ignorance but a choice of method: to be silent where the text itself gives no explanation.
| View | Explanation | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| The name / mark of the sūra | The letters are the name of that sūra | Some sūras really are known by these letters (Ṭāhā, Yāsīn). But the same group of letters comes at the head of more than one sūra (seven sūras begin with "ḥā-mīm"), and that weakens the claim that they are a name |
| An oath | God is swearing by these letters | Oaths in the Qurʾān generally come with an explicit particle of oath; there is none here |
| Abbreviations of names | Alif = Allāh, Lām = Laṭīf, Mīm = Majīd, and so on | It is transmitted with attribution to Ibn ʿAbbās. But it is not systematic — applied to all the groups, the same method does not give consistent results |
| Drawing attention (tanbīh) | An unfamiliar sound pulls the hearer into the text | A plausible function; but it does not explain why these letters |
| The material of the challenge | "Here are the letters the Qurʾān is made of; go ahead and make one yourselves" | I take this up separately below — the strongest view, and the one supported by the text |
Looking at the verses that follow these letters, a regularity appears: most of the letter-groups are followed immediately by an expression that speaks of the Book.
The repetition is too regular to be counted a coincidence. The text itself establishes a link between the letters and the Book.
The reading that follows is this: the letters may be standing there to show the raw material of the Qurʾān. The challenge the Qurʾān throws at the other side — "Then bring a sūra like it" (al-Baqara 2/23) — has meaning only if the material is held in common. The Qurʾān is not made of some extraordinary substance; it is made of the Arabs' own letters, of sounds they themselves knew. The letters are set down first, then it is said "that is the Book": the material is yours, this is the result.
This reading is not certain; but unlike the others it rests on an order inside the text itself. I find it the most reasonable — as a preference, not as a ruling.
Attempts to draw out hidden messages by numerical calculations on these letters (abjad, counting letters, extracting dates) have been tried again and again in the history of exegesis and have fallen into inconsistency again and again. The basic flaw of the method is this: given enough licence, any conclusion can be drawn from any text. That road is not taken in this commentary.
These letters count as a verse, they are recited in prayer, they are written in the muṣḥaf. That their meaning is unknown does not mean they are without function. That the text should have a side which does not open fully to the human being is itself a piece of knowledge: at the very first line the reader meets the fact that he will not solve everything.