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:

1. The sequence of letters must read the same forward and backward.
2. The sequence must be more than three letters long.
3. The diacritics on the letters are ignored when checking if a sequence is a palindrome.
4. The location of spaces between words is also ignored.
5. Letters with shaddah are counted as a single letter, just like they are written.
6. An alif bearing a hamzah, an alif without a hamzah, and a hamzah alone are all treated as different letters.
7. The sequence of letters must be contained within a single verse: it must end in the same verse that it started in.
8. The sequence of letters cannot start or end in the middle of a token, where a token is a complete word or prefix or suffix. So, for example, given the word مِنْهُمْ in the Qu’ran, it is not allowed for a palindrome to start with نْهُمْ or مْ, since this would break up a complete token in the middle; however, starting with هُمْ alone is fine. Similarly, it cannot end with مِ or مِنْهُ, but ending with مِنْ is fine.¹

With the above constraints, I wrote a program that was able to locate the following palindromes within the Qur’an, sorted by decreasing length:

Length  (number of letters)	Palindrome	Number of occurrences in the Qur’an	Locations
9	كَانَ مُؤْمِنًا كَ	1	32:18
7	رَبَّكَ فَكَبِّرْ	1	74:3
7	هُمْ لَعَلِمَهُ	1	4:83
7	كُلٌّ فِى فَلَكٍ	2	21:33, 36:40
5	وَتُؤْتُو	1	2:271
5	قَدْ صَدَق	5	3:152, 5:113, 34:20, 37:105, 48:27
5	لِتَقْتُلَ	1	5:28
5	نَّعْفُ عَن	1	9:66
5	لَّقَدْ قُلْ	1	18:14
5	مَهِّلْهُمْ	1	73:11
5	كَ بِرَبِّكَ	1	82:6

Here are a few more interesting observations:

• If we remove constraint 2 and allow a palindrome to contain just three letters, several other palindromes can be identified, such as وَهُو with 172 occurrences, وَلَو  with 119 occurrences, and لِكُلٍّ with 37 occurrences, among several others.
• If we remove constraint 7 and allow a palindrome to extend across multiple verses, the only real change to the above list is that the second palindrome (رَبَّكَ فَكَبِّرْ) can be extended to a 9 letter palindrome: وَرَبَّكَ فَكَبِّرْ و.
• If we remove constraints 6 and 8, and allow a palindrome to start or end in the middle of a token (and do not distinguish between the alif that has a hamzah and one that does not), plenty of other palindromes show up. The longest of these is the 11 letter palindrome لَآ إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا ٱل in the phrase لَآ إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا ٱلَّذِى, which occurs in verses 10:90, 37:35, and 47:19.
  Other notable mentions (among many others) include the following:
  • The 9 letter palindrome قِتَالُ أَلَّا تُق in the phrase ٱلْقِتَالُ أَلَّا تُقَٰتِلُوا۟ of verse 2:246
  • The 9 letter palindrome الِ وَٱلْأَوْلَٰ in the phrase ٱلْأَمْوَٰلِ وَٱلْأَوْلَٰدِ of verses 17:64 and 57:20 (treating the mini alif like a regular ا)
  • The 8 letter palindrome ثَالِثُ ثَلَٰث the phrase ثَالِثُ ثَلَٰثَة of verse 5:73 (again treating the mini alif like a regular ا).

---

1. I had to take some liberty here in how I define a token. Unlike resources like Qur’an Corpus, I chose not to determine the conjugational suffix on past tense verbs (such as the وا for third person masculine plural) as separate tokens, for example. ↩︎