Maysum

This author has written 26 articles

The Voice of Prayer

I was looking up a ruling regarding the volume of voice involved during the recitation of surahs during prayer and ended up reading all of the relevant rulings from Sayyid Sistani on the topic in both the English and Persian versions of Islamic Laws (Tawḍīh al-Masā’il). I found them quite fascinating and decided to summarize a few of the main rulings in the following fictional story.

Disclaimer: This is not meant to be a definitive discussion on Islamic rulings. Although an attempt has been made to reference every ruling mentioned in the story, every duty-bearing Muslim should consult with the rulings of their own marja’ directly.

Ali finished his Maghrib prayer and turned to face his friend, Kumayl, who was sitting next to him. Kumayl was just finishing his prayer as well.

“Well, Kumayl!” said Ali. “I don’t know whether you just finished your Maghrib prayer or a nāfilah prayer.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Kumayl.

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Palindromes in the Qur’an

How many palindromes are in the Qur’an? It depends on how you define a palindrome.

In English, a palindrome is a word or sequence or words that reads the same backwards and forwards. However, the concept gets a bit more complicated in Arabic. For one thing, Arabic has diacritic marks to take into account; do those have to match up too? On top of that, it’s also not always clear where one word ends and the next one starts – there are all kinds of attached pronouns and prepositions and other things that make word boundaries a little ambiguous.

I decided on a few constraints on what I would consider a palindrome:

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Qur’anic Verb Breakdown

When studying Qur’anic Arabic, a lot of time is spent learning the different forms and cases that verbs can take, and how to conjugate the verbs across all 14 possible Arabic pronouns. A lot of effort can go into memorizing all of these various combinations, although in reality, just a handful of situations make up the vast majority of verb occurrences that actually appear in the Qur’an.

This raises the question: Which verb cases, forms, and conjugations are the most frequently occurring in the Qur’an, and by how much?

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Repeated Phrases in Verses

There is an interesting anecdote about a person who claimed to have memorized the entire Qur’an. In order to validate his claim, a panel of judges selected random excerpts from the holy book and asked him to identify, from memory, which verses the excerpts came from. As a particularly tricky challenge, one judge brought forth the following quote:

فِيهِ فِيهِ

How unusual! There are no nouns or verbs at all here (the phrase literally translates to “in it in it”) so there are no contextual clues to help out with the identification.

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Introduction

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ

The purpose of this blog is to put together, in one place, the various interesting things I discover, reflect upon, or produce.

There are far too many fascinating things I come across that I would rather not get lost or forgotten, so creating a compilation seemed natural; an online repository like a blog has not only the personal advantages of easy cloud access and self-organizing features, but also allows public access to my collection as well. You’re welcome!

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