Programming

What is the midpoint of the Qur’ān?

(Ok, so this might be somewhat of an artificial question, depending on how much value you give to the way the chapters in the Qur’an are presently ordered. But I think the question still has value regardless! It’s interesting to be able to pin down where we can say, when reading the Qur’ān from start to finish, that we’ve reached the halfway point.)

So, what is the midpoint of the Qur’ān? Well, it turns out, it depends on how we want to define “midpoint”…

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:

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:

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.