An Arabic Linguist on Reddit Calls Code 19 Stupid

[Euphoric]

Linguist Marijn Van Putten, PhD
His biography: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/marijn-van-putten#tab-1

Link to the reddit discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicQuran/comments/1848kcy/comment/kb0k7l0/

He was asked:
What do we know about who decided 1) the order of verses within a Surah, 2) the names of the Surahs, and 3) the order of Surahs within the Quran? Which of those were chosen by the Quranic author himself?

On Twitter, you have expressed that you are critical of numerology in the Quran. What would you say is your general problem with numerology (e.g. based on letter or word count)? And do you have any specific thoughts on the so-called Code 19?


Marijn Van Putten [PhDniX] responded:

What do we know about who decided 1) the order of verses within a Surah, 2) the names of the Surahs, and 3) the order of Surahs within the Quran? Which of those were chosen by the Quranic author himself?

Since verses are not atomistic units and one verse logically follows on the next, most of the time, it's not really something that is "decided". That's kind of like asking why Harry Potter starts with page one and not with page 20.

There aren't really fixed names for the Surahs. All throught Islamic history many Surahs have had a multitude of names. Lamya Kandil's Die Surennamen in der offiziellen Kairiner Koranausgabe und ihre Varianten is a nice overview of the different Surah names.

ʿUṯmān's recension put the Surahs in the order we have it, companions clearly had different orders.

So only 1 was "chosen" by the Quranic author himself.

On Twitter, you have expressed that you are critical of numerology in the Quran. What would you say is your general problem with numerology (e.g. based on letter or word count)? And do you have any specific thoughts on the so-called Code 19?

My general problem with it is that it's stupid. My specific thoughts is that the so-called Code 19 is also stupid. This is like asking an astronomer what their issues are with astrology.

There is no objective or coherent way to determine either how many letters are in the Quran nor how many words there are in the Quran. The issues only compound if you have to account for companion codices.

But the basic idea that there would be some numerological code in the Quran (or any other holy book) is so silly that it really doesn't warrant engaging. But all attempts are so horrendously terrible, because they have zero awareness of the assumptions they're putting in that it's really an insult to everyone's intellect.


Asked to elaborate:

Letters: The spelling of ʾalif, in a lot of words appears to have been optional. In early manuscripts hāmān is attested in every single permutation: همن, هامن, همان, هامان. So this word is anywhere between three and five letters. So if we're counting the number of letters in a word, should we count it as three, or five? Based on what principle? There's thousands of cases like this.

Words: There are many words where the Quran has an ambivalent treatment of whether to right it as one or two words. For example kullamā "whenever" is spelled both كلما and كل ما. And while there are some patterns, the patterns are usually not clear enough to know what the Uthmanic text had. So do we count it as one or two words?

It becomes even more difficult with words like this that have non-connecting letters, as there was originally no difference between non-connecting letters and spaces between words. Is māḏā "what" mā "what" + ḏā "this", or is it a single word? The way of writing makes it impossible to tell ماذا. What about بعدما baʿdamā or baʿda mā, there is no objective way to decide whether that is one or two words. "Word" is ultimately a useful, but theoretical construct, and there is no objective definition of it.

Now, you could take a principled and defensible stance on this, for example: I will count all alifs, written or not, and I will always split words when it is ambiguous. But then you still get in trouble with the variant readings, already in al-fātiḥah, the word malik/mālik either has a "underlying" alif or it doesn't. So how many letters is it?

Numerologists waste massive amounts of time without even accounting for such fundamental issues. Of course, even if they did account for it, I think it is still a fool's errant, but now it's just misguided from the outset.