Qur’anic Verses in Verses

Let’s start by looking at the very first verse in the Holy Qur’ān.

It’s an interesting verse for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons (and perhaps not the first reason that comes to mind) is that this verse actually contains another complete verse entirely inside of it:

That itself is pretty unusual, because not many sentences in a typical book contain other sentences from the same book as perfect, proper substrings. (This is different from the concept of repeated phrases within verses, which we have already discussed earlier. This also does not include verses that appear multiple times in the Qur’ān, as contained within themselves: we are talking about verses that appear strictly inside of other verses.)

Now, what’s really interesting is that we can actually go even further than this, and see another verse of the Qur’ān contained inside this verse as well:

Well, if we be a little less strict on our requirements with respect to diacritic placement (regarding which, admittedly, we have already exercised a little lenience), then it is possible to go even deeper, and extract yet another verse from inside of this one:

Even more surprisingly, we could have gone in the opposite direction, and discovered that there is actually a verse in the Holy Qur’ān which contains بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ itself as as substring within it:

With all of this together, we have an inclusion chain of five verses, where each one is contained entirely within the next. This is a pretty fantastic phenomenon!

Is there any other such set of verses in the Holy Qur’ān that experience this inclusion chain property? Is there any chain longer than this one? How common is it for one verse to contain another verse? How common is it for one verse to be contained within another verse? (Those last two are not the same question.)

The answers to all of these may be easily found by, as usual, writing a program. (You can learn how too!) We simply need to search through the text of the Holy Qur’ān specifically for such situations, and with a computer, this isn’t too difficult to do.

Results

It turns out that there are 95 verses contained inside of other verses of the Holy Qur’ān, and 2049 verses that have another verse contained within! That seems like a huge number of verse-containing verses: it seems every 1 in 3 verses of the Holy Qur’ān contains another verse inside of it.

Keep in mind, though, the effect is magnified because of the flexibility of including the Initial-Letter verses, like Haa-Meem, Alif-Laam-Meem, etc. which occur frequently as substrings in verses. Let’s stop considering the Initial-Letter verses for the rest of this analysis, then…

With this perspective:

• There are 90 distinct verses of the Qur’ān that are contained inside at least one other verse elsewhere in the Holy Qur’ān. 
• There are 173 distinct verses of the Qur’ān that contain at least one other complete verse as a substring.

This seems much more reasonable. It turns out that five Initial-Letter verses (namely: الم , يس , حم , طه , المص ) account for over 1800 of verse inclusion scenarios.

Some other interesting observations:

• Verse inclusion always happens in a chain form. If verse A contains both verse B and verse C inside of it, then either B completely contains C, or C completely contains B. It never happens that B and C are disjoint (although this rule is broken if we allow Initial-Letter verses in our analysis).
• The longest chain of verse inclusions is the one of 4 links presented above, that is, 27:30–1:1–1:3–55:1. (We don’t consider the last link, 40:1, if we stop including Initial-Letter verses.) Lucky us; we came across the longest possible chain in our first example!
• There are 8 examples of chains of length 3. Three of these examples, which begin with the verses 2:163, 41:2, and 59:22, contain the substring الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ as 1:1 did, so they all end with the subchain 1:3–55:1.
  The remaining five chains of length 3 are shown below:

Inner verse	# of times the inner verse appears in another verse	Outer verses containing this inner verse
(55:1) الرَّحْمَٰنُ	47	(1:1), (1:3), (2:163), (13:30), (17:110), (19:18), (19:45), (19:58), (19:61), (19:69), (19:75), (19:78), (19:85), (19:87), (19:88), (19:93), (19:96), (20:5), (20:90), (20:109), (21:26), (21:36), (21:42), (21:112), (25:59), (25:60), (25:63), (26:5), (27:30), (36:11), (36:15), (36:23), (36:52), (41:2), (43:19), (43:20), (43:33), (43:36), (43:45), (50:33), (59:22), (67:3), (67:19), (67:20), (67:29), (78:37), (78:38)
(37:110) كَذَٰلِكَ نَجْزِي الْمُحْسِنِينَ	8	(6:84), (12:22), (28:14), (37:80), (37:105), (37:121), (37:131), (77:44)
(37:155) أَفَلَا تَذَكَّرُونَ	6	(10:3), (11:24), (11:30), (16:17), (23:85), (45:23)
(55:3) خَلَقَ الْإِنْسَانَ	6	(4:28), (16:4), (21:37), (32:7), (55:14), (96:2)
(1:2) الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ	5	(6:45), (10:10), (37:182), (39:75), (40:65)
(1:3) الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ	5	(1:1), (2:163), (27:30), (41:2), (59:22)
(36:4) عَلَىٰ صِرَاطٍ مُسْتَقِيمٍ	5	(6:39), (11:56), (16:76), (43:43), (67:22)
(26:220) إِنَّهُ هُوَ السَّمِيعُ الْعَلِيمُ	4	(8:61), (12:34), (41:36), (44:6)
(101:1) الْقَارِعَةُ	3	(69:4), (101:2), (101:3)

While most of the verses that contain other verses would only contain one or two at a time, the verses that are on the inside – those that are contained in the larger verses – are often repeatedly used as inner verses. Some of the most frequently recurring verses to appear inside of other verses are shown in the table below, along with the number of times they appear inside other verses, and the places in which this happens.

Finally, to round it off, here’s a list of all of the remaining verse-inside-verse scenarios in the Holy Qur’ān.

Inner	Outer		Inner	Outer
(10:63)	(27:53), (41:18)		(37:154)	(10:35)
(15:84)	(39:50), (40:82)		(37:159)	(23:91)
(15:93)	(2:134), (2:141)		(37:16)	(23:82)
(26:8)	(26:139), (26:158)		(37:44)	(15:47)
(26:108)	(3:50), (43:63)		(37:73)	(10:73)
(26:135)	(7:59), (46:21)		(37:80)	(37:105)
(26:138)	(34:35), (37:59)		(37:182)	(6:45)
(26:147)	(15:45), (51:15)		(38:40)	(38:25)
(33:3)	(4:81), (33:48)		(38:76)	(7:12)
(37:43)	(10:9), (22:56)		(38:87)	(12:104)
(56:24)	(32:17), (46:14)		(39:39)	(6:135)
(69:1)	(69:2), (69:3)		(39:40)	(11:39)
(84:24)	(3:21), (9:34)		(40:76)	(39:72)
(114:6)	(11:119), (32:13)		(44:7)	(26:24)
(1:1)	(27:30)		(48:8)	(33:45)
(2:147)	(10:94)		(54:16)	(54:18)
(3:2)	(2:255)		(54:39)	(54:37)
(3:51)	(19:36)		(55:74)	(55:56)
(3:74)	(2:105)		(56:17)	(76:19)
(5:10)	(57:19)		(56:53)	(37:66)
(7:78)	(29:37)		(62:4)	(57:21)
(15:77)	(29:44)		(68:7)	(16:125)
(17:49)	(17:98)		(69:2)	(69:3)
(19:88)	(21:26)		(70:25)	(51:19)
(20:116)	(2:34)		(70:9)	(101:5)
(22:8)	(31:20)		(71:11)	(11:52)
(23:102)	(7:8)		(75:34)	(75:35)
(23:22)	(40:80)		(77:15)	(52:11)
(25:56)	(17:105)		(77:18)	(37:34)
(26:107)	(44:18)		(77:50)	(7:185)
(26:182)	(17:35)		(78:4)	(78:5)
(26:183)	(11:85)		(79:13)	(37:19)
(26:2)	(12:1)		(79:15)	(20:9)
(26:43)	(10:80)		(79:42)	(7:187)
(26:90)	(50:31)		(84:7)	(69:19)
(27:2)	(2:97)		(85:16)	(11:107)
(27:80)	(30:52)		(92:1)	(91:4)
(31:2)	(10:1)		(94:6)	(94:5)
(35:16)	(14:19)		(101:2)	(101:3)
(35:19)	(40:58)		(102:3)	(102:4)
(36:3)	(2:252)

Does any of this help us understand the Holy Qur’ān any better? Maybe; maybe not. It might, however, help raise our knowledge and appreciation for the linguistic and literary merits of the book. This isn’t a property that is common in most English written work, I think. It seems like it is the poetic style of the Qur’ān, with its characteristic repetition, variance in verse length, and phrase fragmentation, that allows this verse inclusion ability to happen so frequently.

In any case, it’s fun to come across examples of this curious phenomenon. It’s as though, while reading through a verse in one part of the Holy Qur’ān, you are reminded of another verse which appears somewhere in a completely different chapter. Maybe the fact that these “inner verses” are repeated so much indicates that they are something the Author of the Qur’ān really wants attention to be paid to; they are lines so important that He himself quotes them!