The Indian Qur'anic scholar Hamiduddin Farahi (d. 1930) proposed a theory at once startling and profound: that these disjointed letters are not arbitrary phonemes but symbolic remnants of a much older language—one predating Arabic, reaching into a time when letters were also pictures.
Farahi believed the muqattaʿāt preserved traces of ancient pictographic scripts—perhaps Semitic or pre-Semitic in origin—where each letter stood not just for a sound, but for an idea, a thing, a symbol. This is akin to how Chinese symbols don’t only symbolise meaning but also the letters take on the shape of the object they represent.
For example:
Alif (ا) was once associated with a cow.
Baa (ب) with a house.
Jeem (ج) with a camel.
Ta (ط) with a serpent.
These symbols, Farahi argued, serve as thematic keys to the surahs they introduce. Surah Al-Baqarah ("The Cow") opens with Alif, the letter linked to a cow. Surah Ta-Ha, which narrates Moses and the serpent, begins with Ta. This, for Farahi, is no coincidence. It is revelation working through symbolic compression—a divine language where each letter carries the ancient weight of form, meaning, and memory.
The implication is staggering: that even the letters of the Qur’an are rooted in a primordial archive of human language—symbols older than script, older than alphabet. That the Divine speaks not only in meaning, but in remnants.
The letter ‘Qaf’ for example, signifies something that involves great and sustained exertion of effort, arduous toil against something that resists our efforts like a great physical mass resists physical force. It’s trying; it’s toilsome; sometimes even unbearable. It’s exhausting. Thus when Surah 50 begins with this disjointed letter, ‘Qaf’, it is an allusion to the difficulties that come with the role of Prophethood. The task is hard. Heavy is the head that wears its crown.
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