Muqattaʿat
disjoined letters beginning some verses in the Qur'an of unknown meaning
The mysterious letters (muqaṭṭaʿāt, Arabic: حُرُوف مُقَطَّعَات ḥurūf muqaṭṭaʿāt, "disjoined letters" or "disconnected letters") are combinations of between one and five Arabic letters that appear at the beginning of 29 out of the 114 chapters (surahs) of the Quran just after the Bismillāh Islamic phrase. The letters are also known as fawātiḥ (فَوَاتِح) or "openers" as they form the opening verse of their respective surahs.
Four (or five) chapters are named for their muqaṭṭaʿāt: Ṭā-Hā, Yā-Sīn, Ṣād, Qāf, and sometimes Nūn.
Interpretations
Enigmatic / obscurative
Ahsan ur Rehman (2013) claims that there are phonological, syntactic and semantic links between the prefixed letters and the text of the chapters. Abd Allah ibn Abbas and Abdullah ibn Masud, are said to have favored the view that these letters stand for words or phrases related to God and His Attributes. 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. The general belief of most Muslims is that their meaning is known only to God. The Arabic word for "Ghayb" is غَائِب (/ɣāʔib/), meaning "absent" or "missing". In the context of Al-Ghayb (الغيب), it refers to the unseen, hidden, or concealed.
“Muqattaʿat” enters the record as disjoined letters beginning some verses in the Qur'an of unknown meaning. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Muqattaʿat, disjoined and letters can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Muqattaʿat” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Muqattaʿat, disjoined and letters provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q192951. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2013.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Muqattaʿat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.