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• Argues that they are abbreviations of signs/words from the celestial quran/archetype
• They are clearly closely related and linked to the prophetology and scripturology of the Quran.

1. Diachronic analysis indicates that the letters facilitated and accompanied transitions in quranic revelation theology. Each set of letters is analyzed and their referents are proposed. Because the letters primarily functioned to communicate revealed prophetological assurances in the face of political weakness, it is argued, their function became obsolete with the prophet’s ascension to power.
2. The analysis indicates that the letters’ subjects were specific, coherent, and logical. Against a context of communal rejection and the Hour’s unexpected delay, the letters repetitively invoked how God had commissioned his previous prophets—especially Moses. As reminders, the letters inspired the Lord’s Arabian servant to continue to speak as a prophetic repetition, a neo-Moses type who conveyed the same essential message as his predecessors, and was therefore assured the same ultimate success. His recitations were articulated as an Arabiclanguage confirmation of prior prophecy, conveying the same truth about the Lord’s approaching judgment. Reception and contemplation of the letters helped assure their diviner that his prophetic cycle, which was currently embroiled in its ‘nocturnal’ stage of intense communal conflict and opposition, would inevitably culminate like all prior prophetic cycles had: With the decreed Day that vindicated the prophet and punished his disobedient opponents. The letters functioned as logical elements of early quranic prophetology. The analysis also explains why the letters were largely abandoned in ‘Medinan’ surahs, and why Islamic tradition did not retain their meaning. Their assurance function was rendered obsolete by the prophet’s ascension to political power in Yathrib. Their revelation theology—reflecting a ‘translational’ divination process, in which the prophet actively arranged full recitations by inspiration from embryonic written revelation—was displaced by a model that conceptualized the prophet’s inspired speech as a much more mechanical transmission of a written revelation.

Here are the letters, arranged by their order of appearance:

ten threshold observations:

• 1. The nūn of Q 68:1 is by far the letters’ earliest use.
• 2. The letters are otherwise almost entirely in second and third Meccan surahs.
• 3. Second Meccan surahs use extremely diverse letters, with just two of their sets being identical (the ḥā mīm of Q 43 and 44).
• 4. Alif lām appears in only one of the first and second Meccan surahs (Q 15), but alif lām is used in 12 out of the 18 third Meccan and Medinan letter sets. This strongly suggests a shift towards using the Arabic definite article al-.
• 5. The letters’ diversity collapses in late Meccan and Medinan surahs. 17 of the 18 letter sets in third Meccan and Medinan surahs include either alif lām or ḥā mīm. The alif lām sequences all begin either alif lām rā or alif lām mīm. |
• 6. Although the letters’ diversity collapsed after second Meccan surahs, their rate of usage increased to an extraordinary degree. The letters open 16 out of the 21 third Meccan surahs—76 percent.
• 7. Only two Medinan surahs use the letters, indicating that their function was not evidently as vital or beneficial for that compositional context.
• 8. The chronology does not suggest an effort to convey an abjad sequence.
• 9. Q 19 and 42 have five letter sets, while Q 7 and 13 have four letter sets. Otherwise, only 1-3 letters are used.
• 10. Letters disambiguated with diacritics are extremely rare, consisting of the nūn of Q 68, the qāf of Q 50 and 42, and the yā of Q 19 and 36.

How The Qur’ān’s Prophetology Evolved From Its Basal State

Helping to assert the unity of quranic revelation, in my view the letters were divined as a ‘written’ reminder that inspired their following Arabic speech. In this respect the letters were functionally similar to the quranic narratives that begin ’iḏ (“when”), followed by a short phrase or narrative. A simple example is Q 19:1-3, kāf hā yā ʿayn ṣād / ḏikru raḥmati rabbika ʿabdahū zakariyyā / ʾiḏ nādā rabbahū nidāʾan ḫafiyyan , meaning “k-h-y-‘-ṣ / A reminder of your Lord’s mercy on his servant Zechariah / When he called on his Lord in secret.” The ’iḏ function reminds its addressee by invoking stories that the prophetic servant already knows. These reminders may precede a long expository narrative, but more often they just function to concisely invoke and precede the essential elements of a known narrative. A reminder of those elements forced the servant to contemplate his pre-existing knowledge, and thereafter communicate an associated message to his audiences. That is precisely how I suggest the letters functioned, albeit in an even more condensed form. They were divined as bits of heavenly text that reminded their addressee about essential prophetological subjects. The prophet then elaborated upon these reminders via delivering Arabic recitations. The letters were signs of a larger whole, a qurān, that he worked to accurately articulate and proclaim as his arranged recitations. Above all, the letters supported a refocused vision of the prophet’s task—in the wake of the Hour’s delay, and the increasingly divided and discontinuous deliveries of the prophet’s recitations, they repetitively assured the prophet that he must be patient and endure his community’s obdurate failure to prostrate and obey its Lord’s messages. In that respect, the letters were tied to the same conflict that Saleh identifies as pervading the last ‘Meccan’ surahs, and claims ultimately forced the prophet’s hiğrah to Yathrib.

1. Determining Referents For The Quranic Letters—Some Basic Principles
   • The letters abbreviate Arabic words, as opposed to words in other languages.
   • The letters perform a coherent prophetological function, rather than referring to a mass of discontinuous subjects (like surah titles might).
   • Since the letters displace the cosmic oaths used in earlier surahs, they are likely to incorporate themes and functions that parallel those oaths.
   • Since many letter combinations repeat across multiple surahs, the association of the letters with the specific words of each surah is likely to be relatively loose.
   • Abbreviations cannot skip letters of a word’s rasm without a good explanation.
   • The letters do not need to abbreviate words in a specified grammatical relation to each other. “A fig and an olive” could thus be abbreviated as either t-z or z-t.
   • If any grammatical relation is specified, however, it must be in correct sequence. The phrase kitāb mubīn could be abbreviated as k-m, but not as m-k.
   • Some letters will have more than one plausible referent. There will inevitably be limits on the degree of certainty that can be produced.
   • The specific form of a referent is harder to ascertain, since a given meaning could be expressed by many derived forms (singular/dual/plural, noun/adjective/verb, nominative/accusative/genitive). This indeterminacy is aggravated by the fact that quranic Arabic differed in many respects from Classical Arabic, such as its lack of a medial glottal stop, nunation, and most classical case endings (See, e.g., Marijn van Putten, “Hamzah in the Quranic Consonantal Text,” Orientalia 87:1 (2018): 93-120; id., “The development of the triphthongs in Quranic and Classical Arabic,” Arabian Epigraphic Notes 3 (2017), 47–74; id., “Case in the Qur’ānic Consonantal Text,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 108 (2018): 143-79).

The nūn would be a poor abbreviation for the surah’s title, however, because the prophet’s actual name is yūnus (Q 37:139, 6:86, 4:163), and Q 68:48 actually identifies Jonah by calling him the ṣāḥibi l-ḥūti, “companion of the fish [ḥūt].” By contrast, the Qur’ān only uses the epithet ḏū al-nūn once, in Q 21:87. If the letter was a revealed reminder that inspired its recitation, however, that better explains why the nūn would have invoked Jonah’s story. The similarity between reciting nūn and reciting ḏū al-nūn may have dramatized the identity between the letters of a heavenly kitāb that the prophet was putatively divining and his recitation of a qurān that communicated their message. Regardless of which referent is preferred here, the nūn is much more effectively explained as an originating ‘sign,’ rather than as a secondary addition. It likely conveyed that the prophetic commission required the servant to be patient in performing his task as a messenger during the judgment’s ‘nocturnal gestation’ period, enduring his community’s criticism. He was not mağnūn, and would be rewarded on his Lord’s Day.

The rhymed end words convey the essential elements of Moses’ commission as a prophet. The Lord’s guidance (hudā) was received by Moses (mūsā) at a sacred valley of ṭuwā (returning) where he received what is revealed (yūḥā). The ṭā hā of Q 20 efficiently invokes this essential prophetology, which the Arabian prophet’s mission was repeating. Ṭā hā does not, then, correspond to a rigid grammatical phrase. Rather the ‘written’ signs functioned like condensed signifiers of the rhymed end words of the Q 20:10-13 narrative. Their referents were the essential elements, set in logical sequence, that conveyed this basic reminder about young Moses’ commission. The full recitation was then expanded from the prophet’s receipt and contemplation of this embryonic reminder. That process of oracular expansion determined not only the surah’s semantic content, but also likely its rhyme scheme, setting the -ā end rhyme. This provides insight into the prophet’s process of translating his divined signs, āyāt, into full surahs. The letters ṭā hā thus functioned like the rhetorical question hal ’atāka ḥadīṯu mūsā of Q 20:9 and 79:15. They reminded the prophet about the commission of his predecessor Moses at the burning bush. That reminder inspired the recitation.

1. Ṭā Sīn Mīm [ṭsm]—Q 26, 28 and Ṭā Sīn [ṭs]—Q 27 – Q 26, 27, and 28 all center on narrating the story of Moses. Following the oracular logic that this paper advocates, their letters did not summarize the content of the following recitation. Rather the prophet’s contemplation of the letters’ subject—his predecessor’s reception of revelation at an isolated cosmic juncture—inspired the surah’s formation and delivery. What the letters of Q 26-28 invoke, then, is the cosmic junction at which Moses had previously been summoned and commissioned by his Lord. They reminded the quranic servant how he had likewise been summoned to enter the Lord’s sacred land during his nocturnal devotions, where he had received the quranic revelation (see Q 53). The letters of Q 26-28 repeated the same function that the oaths of Q 90 and 95 had previously performed. They promised the Arabian servant that he had been tasked with a repetition of Moses’ service, and so was assured an equivalent reward at the completion of that task.
2. Kāf Hā Yā ‘Ayn Ṣād [khy‘ṣ]—Q 19 – The ‘divine reminder’ approach can much more effectively explain the Q 19 letters, while beginning with the same premise that the yā and ‘ayn referred to yahyā and ‘isā. If these letters performed a reminder function that paralleled the ṭūr saynā mūsā of Q 26, 27, 28 and the ṭuwā hudā of Q 20 (as discussed above), then their kāf and hā must refer to the equivalent process that had made John and Jesus into equivalent prophets. The same prophetology is ceaselessly repeated. To make these men prophets, God had guided them into a purified ethical status—a function specified with h-d-y derivatives—and given them al-kitāb, divine writing.

PROPOSED REFERENTS OF THE QUR’ĀN’S DISCONNECTED LETTERS