A few years ago, I thought it would be interesting to take all of the words in (the English translation of) each Juzz’ of the Qur’ān and see what they would look like as word clouds. The result would be 30 images, each of which captures the most repeated terms in the corresponding section of the Qur’ān. It would be an easy way to see, at a glance, what each Juzz’ is talking about.
Sometimes, you think you really have reached an understanding of how things work. You get it. The rules have started to make sense.
And then you realize that no, actually, things don’t work the way you think they do, and everything you once believed is now under question.
This might happen in a lot of different contexts, but it can happen extremely often when studying the Arabic language, which is notorious for having exceptions upon exceptions. Now, usually, it’s very clear that a given rule has a lot of exceptions, and that it should be treated more like a general guideline than an actual law. However, there are some cases where something really looks like it might be an absolute rule that you can put your trust in… until you realize it’s not.
Here are some exceptional cases for what might have appeared to be exceptionless rules…
No, I’m not talking about verses of the Qur’ān that can be used to treat nasal congestion. I’m interested in finding out which verses can be pronounced correctly even when the reciter has a stuffy nose.
There is a property called ghunna that applies to some of the letters in the Qur’ān. Basically, in order to recite a letter with ghunna, the nose has to play a role in the pronunciation; the mouth and throat are not enough to generate the correct sound. There are some verses in the Qur’ān that contain no instances of ghunna. For example, the first verse of Sūrah 113: al-Falaq (if recited correctly) will sound the same whether you pinch your nose or not – try it!
قُلْ أَعُوذُ بِرَبِّ ٱلْفَلَقِ
My question is: how many verses are there in the Qur’ān that have this property?
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:
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?
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.