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The Initials Add Up

How these counts were made

"Over it is nineteen" (74:30). God sealed His final message with a mathematical miracle, and in 1974 He unveiled it through Dr. Rashad Khalifa, who counted the Quranic Initials from the Egyptian Quran printed in 1960, typed into a computer. The totals are published in Appendix 1. Every total is a multiple of 19.

After Dr. Khalifa passed away, a group of people who claim to follow him counted the initials again. They used a modern printing. They threw out thirteen of the counts in Appendix 1: the totals of the thirteen suras whose initials include Alif. Appendix 1 gives them like this:

Eleven of their thirteen totals are not multiples of 19. On that basis they said the count in Appendix 1 was wrong.

That is where this work began. We counted the letters again, from the Arabic text in this app. We followed the rule of Appendix 1. For the hamza words, we read each word the way the verse-by-verse tables of 1982 read it; those tables are printed in the book Quran: Visual Presentation of the Miracle. The result: our count gives all thirteen totals above, exactly as Appendix 1 prints them, and every one is a multiple of 19. The same is true for the other sixteen suras in Appendix 1. Of its 78 letter counts, 74 match to the digit. The four that differ are the Alif and the Lam of Sura 11 and of Sura 30, each by one:

The 1982 tables also show what happened. The 1974 count missed one Lam in 11:70 and one Lam in 30:21. Sura 11 has 795 Lams and Sura 30 has 394. Appendix 1 prints 794 and 393. This does not make the totals wrong. In each of those two suras the printed Alif count is one too high: 1370 and 544. One Lam too few and one Alif too many cancel out. So the totals of Sura 11 and Sura 30, 2489 and 1254, stay exactly as Appendix 1 prints them. And with the right Lam counts, the Lams of all thirteen suras add up to 11799 = 19 × 621. With the printed counts they would add up to 11797, which is not a multiple of 19. That is Fact 3.

One table in Appendix 1 does not work out when we count from the Quran's text: Table 10. Here is what happens.

Here is what Table 10 does. For each initialed sura it takes two numbers: how many initials the sura has, and the gematrical value of those initials. It adds the two together for all 29 suras and gets 1089479 = 19 × 57341.

Now remember the two Lams the 1974 count missed. A Lam is worth 30. The Alif counted once too often is worth 1. So when we count the text, Sura 11's value goes up by 29, and so does Sura 30's. The number of initials stays the same. Table 10's total becomes 1089537. Divide that by 19 and 1 is left over. Table 10 only works if you leave the two Lams out:

There is a second problem with Table 10. It adds a count of letters to the value of the same letters. But that value already comes from the count: each letter's count times what the letter is worth. So the count is used twice. That is like counting your coins, adding up what they are worth, and then adding the count on top. Nowhere else in the Quran's 38 appendices, or in its footnotes, is that done; we checked every one. The appendices add counts to counts, values to values, and either one to sura and verse numbers. Appendix 15 writes a count and a value next to each other, but does not add them. The few times a number is multiplied, in Tables 13 and 15 and once in Appendix 24, two different things are multiplied and nothing is added to the result.

So we set Table 10 aside. Of all the calculations in the 38 appendices of this Quran, it is the only one that the letters of the Quran's text break. No fact below uses Table 10's method. We found six such numbers that are multiples of 19, and we left them out for that reason.

Some words can be spelled with or without an Alif. In those verses we changed the reader's Arabic text to the spelling the 1982 tables count. That way, what you see is what we counted. The next section lists every one.

The words read as the tables read them

In 76 verses, the 1982 tables count a hamza word differently from the way the 1960 print spells it. Each is a real spelling of the same word, found in printed Qurans. In those verses we changed the word in the reader's text from the print's spelling to the tables'. There are six kinds of change:

Six of these changes are not in the tables. The totals of Suras 11, 13 and 32 in Appendix 1 need them. We made each change where the tables read the same word the same way most often:

In seven verses, no spelling reaches the figure Appendix 1 prints: 11:74, 11:107, 12:11, 12:39, 13:41, 30:53 and 32:10. We count those as the text stands.

The results

Here are the results. We built every number below from these counts, on the Arabic text as the app shows it. We count the Basmalah and never give it a number. The gematrical value of a letter is the number the old Arabic alphabet gave it: Alif is 1, Lam is 30, Mim is 40, and so on. The gematrical value of a verse's initials is those numbers added up, once for each time the letter occurs. Each fact tells you how to build its number, in the appendices' own words. It shows Sura 2 written that way, row by row. Then it gives the whole number as 19 times another number, so you can check it on any calculator.

The facts run in one list, Fact 1 to Fact 164. The first six are totals of whole suras, as Appendix 1 gives them. From Fact 7 on, we write the verses one by one, verse after verse and sura after sura, in the ways the appendices use: next to each other, added up, or lined up on the left and added.

Also confirmed on the text

Each of these holds on the Arabic text as printed, in every recognised reading, with nothing adjusted:

The Alif-Lam suras' totals (A.L.M., A.L.R., A.L.M.R., A.L.M.S.) are each multiples of 19 as Appendix 1 publishes them, with the Alif reading.

How the letters are counted

These results were found by testing calculations of the kinds the appendices use. The calculations that did not give multiples of 19 are recorded in the working notes.