Muqatta'at

The Muqattaʿāt (Arabic: حروف مقطعات ‎‎ ḥurūf muqaṭṭaʿāt "disjoined letters" or "disconnected letters"; also "mysterious letters") are combinations of between one and five Arabic letters figuring at the beginning of 29 out of the 114 surahs (chapters) of the Quran just after the basmala. The letters are also known as fawātih (فواتح) or "openers" as they form the opening verse of their respective suras .

Four surahs are named for their muqatta'at, Ṭāʾ-Hāʾ, Yāʾ-Sīn , Ṣād and Qāf.

The original significance of the letters is unknown. Tafsir (exegesis) has interpreted them as abbreviations for either names or qualities of God or for the names or content of the respective surahs.

Muqatta'at occur in suras 2–3, 7, 10–15, 19–20, 26–32, 36, 38, 40–46, 50 and 68. The letters are written together like a word, but each letter is pronounced separately.

There are 14 unique combinations; the most frequent are ʾAlif Lām Mīm and Ḥāʾ Mīm, occurring six times each. Of the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, exactly one half appear as muqatta'at, either singly or in combinations of two, three, four or five letters. The fourteen letters are: ʾalif أ, hā هـ, ḥā ح, ṭā ط, yā ي, kāf ك, lām ل, mīm م, nūn ن, sīn س, ʿain ع, ṣād ص, qāf ق, rā ر. The six final letters of the Abjadi order ( thakhadh ḍaẓagh) are unused. The letters represented correspond to those letters written without Arabic diacritics plus yāʿ ي. It is possible that the restricted set of letters was supposed to invoke an archaic variant of the Arabic alphabet modeled on the Aramaic alphabet.

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