Qur’an

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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