Quran code

What it is

The Quran code, also called Code 19, is a claim about Islam's scripture: that its Arabic text carries a deliberate mathematical design, with the number 19 at its heart. Believers point to tallies of words, letters and surahs (the chapters) that land on multiples of 19, and they take this as proof that the book has a divine author. The idea was announced in 1974 by Rashad Khalifa, an Egyptian-American biochemist, and grew from his study of the Muqattaʿat, the lone Arabic letters that open 29 of the Quran's 114 surahs. It sits in the wide family of text-numerology: like gematria elsewhere, it reads meaning into counts, though here the aim is proof of authorship rather than prediction.

Where it comes from

Rashad Khalifa, an Egyptian-born biochemist working in America, began in 1969 to examine the Quran's separated letters and the number sequences bound up with them. In 1973 he brought out a book treating these initials through their counts and distributions. The next year came his announcement: a code keyed to 19, hidden in the text, with Surah 74, verse 30, "Over it is nineteen", offered as the number's warrant. To carry the idea he started the United Submitters International. Among Muslims the claim found a mixed audience: some Quranists and some traditional Muslims took it up, while others rejected it outright. Outside the Muslim world it drew little notice, though the columnist Martin Gardner described Khalifa's research in Scientific American as early as 1980.

How it is done

Nothing is hidden beyond the plain text; the work is counting. Advocates tally how often a word or letter appears, add the digits of large totals, and mark where the Bismillah, the opening formula, stands. In his book Nineteen, Edip Yüksel reports that the Bismillah holds 19 letters, that its word for God appears 2,698 times, and that the 114 chapters and, on his reckoning, 6,346 verses are likewise multiples of 19. He also notes that 19 surahs separate the one missing a Bismillah from the one carrying a second. Abdullah Arik works instead with Abjad numerals, giving each Arabic letter its old number value and summing the Basmala. Khalifa combed the 29 initialled surahs statistically for his patterns.

Tools and materials

The instruments are the text's own parts: counts of letters and words; the Bismillah, the formula that opens every surah but one; and the Muqattaʿat, the letter-openings on 29 surahs, which Khalifa called the code's key. Checksums and cross sums, the adding and re-adding of totals, serve to test results. The number 19 itself is treated as the seal every total is expected to bear.

What it is for

For those who hold it, the code exists to settle a question: who wrote the Quran? A pattern of 19s, they argue, could only have been placed there by God, so the counts amount to a mathematical proof of divine authorship. Khalifa presented his findings as God reaching people through numbers, and grounded the number's role in Surah 74:30. The claim also carries weight inside the belief: Khalifa used it to argue that the last two verses of Surah 9 were added by human hands, and so to fix the Quran's verse total at 6,346.

Who does it

The claim has been advanced by writers rather than a clergy. Rashad Khalifa trained as a biochemist. Edip Yüksel, a Turkish author in the Quranist current and a colleague of Khalifa, and Abdullah Arik, another Quranistic writer, produced books of counts and gematria. The United Submitters International, the association Khalifa began, keeps the teaching going, and its audience includes Quranists and some traditional Muslims. The opposing voices are also writers: Bilal Philips published a book-length rejection, and Martin Gardner followed the claim in print for years, from a 1980 Scientific American note to a 1997 Skeptical Inquirer column.

Peoples and places

Khalifa was Egyptian by birth and American by career, and a 1994 scholarly volume on Muslim communities in North America covers the movement he founded. Edip Yüksel writes from Turkey, giving the claim a Turkish Quranist strand. Wherever readers count the Arabic text the argument can travel: it needs no shrine and no calendar, only the book. Adherents are found among Quranists, among members of the United Submitters, and among some traditional Muslims. In the Western world at large the claim has stayed little known, with a brief Scientific American notice and a later Skeptical Inquirer column as its main coverage.

What people believe

The worldview is one of a fully deliberate text: every letter sits where God wanted it, so counting can reveal intention. The number 19 draws its standing from Surah 74:30. Khalifa's system, however, presses against the received text. He held that Surah 9's final two verses were a human addition, citing a hadith in which Zaid ibn Thābit, compiling the Quran for Abu Bakr, found only one witness, Khuzaima al-Ansari, for them. He read a second Nūn into Surah 68's opening letter and preferred a Sīn spelling of "basṭatan" in 7:69, pointing to the ninth-century Samarkand Codex. Each adjustment serves the pattern; critics see the adjustments as the pattern's weak point.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Academic and sceptical interest has been thin but pointed. Martin Gardner mentioned the research in Scientific American in 1980 and returned to it in the Skeptical Inquirer in 1997, after Khalifa's death. The standard objection is statistical: in any large dataset, chance alone throws up patterns, and critics invoke stochastic processes, the mathematics of randomness, to account for the 19s without any designer. Matthew Stanley's 2016 study examines the "mathematical miracle" claim critically. Manuscript scholarship raises a further problem: early Quran copies differ in spelling from place to place, so reconstructing a single original text, an urtext, for counting purposes is hard, and without it no letter total is secure.

Compare and confuse

The claim is usually shelved next to the Bible code, a separate and much-debated search for hidden messages in the Bible. The subject also touches cryptography, the craft of secret writing, though nothing here is encrypted: the counts sit in open text. A final see-also, karamat, points to the wonders associated with holy figures in Islam, a different kind of marvel altogether.

Today

The belief is a going concern. The United Submitters International continues Khalifa's project; Quranist writers keep producing counts, and material circulates online, from video talks to an archived page listing 171 examples of the claimed system. A 2016 critical book shows the argument is still being fought. Outside Muslim circles, though, notice has stayed slight: a 1980 magazine mention, a 1997 sceptical column, and little else in the Western world.

Questions people ask about Quran code

Good reading and sources

• Quran code on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data