Qur’an

The Qur’an’s Most Flexible Verbs

One cool thing about the Arabic language is that you can take a base “root word” and extract derivative words with related meanings by plugging the letters of the root word into different templates, or “forms”.

I’m not going to get into the details about how this process works here; we can leave that to the linguists. Instead, I’m interested in exploring a specific question: in the Qur’ān, which root verb appears in the most derivative verb forms? In other words: of all the root verbs that appear in the Qur’ān, which one comes in the biggest variety of flavours?

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The Middle of the Qur’an

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”…

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Qur’anic Verses in Verses

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

In the name of Allāh, the Beneficient,
the Merciful. [Al-Fātiḥah, 1:1]

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:

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Logical Reasoning and the Torn Shirt

The story of Prophet Yūsuf in the Qur’ān includes an episode that presents an interesting exercise in logical reasoning. In the incident where the ‘Azīz of Egypt finds his wife and Prophet Yūsuf making conflicting claims, a witness speaks up and presents a series of statements that make it possible to reach a conclusion about what happened using a combination of observation (of Prophet Yusuf’s shirt) and logic.

Verses 25 to 28 of Surah #12 Yūsuf mention the following:

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Juzz’ Word Clouds

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.

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Exceptional Situations

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…

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Qur’anic Verses for Stuffy Noses

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?

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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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