Basmala Data

We are now beginning to enter the mathematical structure of the Quran in earnest.

Our first stop is not a hidden phrase known to no one. On the contrary, it is perhaps one of the best-known, most frequently heard and most often repeated expressions in the Muslim world:

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

It is said before eating and at the beginning of a task. It is written at the head of books, letters and speeches. For centuries it has been on the lips of millions. Perhaps precisely because it is so familiar, we rarely feel the need to stop and truly look at it.

Yet the Basmala, the Quran’s opening formula, is an extremely small structure: only four words and, in its Arabic original, 19 letters.

That is all.

What we are about to see is how dense a numerical order can be contained within this tiny four-word sentence.

A world in which letters are also numbers: Abjad

First, let us become familiar with the numbers we will use. The calculations that follow do not employ numbers selected from outside and imposed on the Basmala afterwards. Every item of data comes from the sentence itself: the order of its words, its letter counts, the positions of its letters and their historical numerical values.

Using separate digits from 0 to 9 feels so natural today that it is easy to forget this was not always the case. For centuries, different societies also used letters to write numbers.

Roman numerals are a familiar example. The Latin letters I, V, X, L, C, D and M represent 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1,000 respectively. C remains the letter C, but within a Roman numeral it means 100. D is a letter and also 500; M is 1,000.

Abjad is one historical expression of the same basic idea in the Arabic writing tradition. Letters receive numerical values according to the old alphabetical order. The first letters represent units, followed by tens and hundreds, with values extending to 1,000. Alif is 1, Ba 2, Jim 3, Dal 4 and Ha 5; Ya is 10, Kaf 20, Lam 30, Mim 40 and Nun 50; Qaf is 100, Ra 200 and Ghayn 1,000.

This system is not merely a device used in mystical interpretation. Historically it was used for writing and numbering figures, and it continued in astronomical tables and chronograms. Here, Abjad is not used for divination or talismans, but as a data system that supplies the historical numerical values of letters.

Calculating the Abjad value of a word is simple: add together the numerical values of the letters that form it.

Now let us examine the Basmala’s four words, their letter counts and their Abjad values:

The table is small—almost excessively small at first glance.

Four words. Their letter counts are 3, 4, 6 and 6, totalling 19. Their Abjad values are 102, 66, 329 and 289, totalling 786.

What can possibly emerge from such a small data set? We might add a few figures, place some numbers side by side, notice one or two interesting coincidences and move on. At this point there is no reason to expect more from an ordinary sentence.

In the signs that follow, we will sometimes add numbers and sometimes place them side by side, without changing their order, to form one long number. For example, writing 4, 19 and 786 consecutively gives 419786. In the web view, spaces separate the data blocks; when copied, the number can be used as a single whole.

If you are ready, let us begin with the simplest example.

Sign 1: Nineteen in the very first count

Let us begin without any complex operation: no addition, no multiplication, not even an Abjad calculation. We simply count the letters in the Arabic Basmala one by one.

The result is 19 letters.

A nineteen-letter sentence does not by itself prove a miracle. Let us simply keep it as our first sign, because we are still at the surface of the sentence.

Sign 2: Where did the apparently missing Basmala go?

Now let us move beyond the four-word sentence and look at the Quran as a whole.

The Quran consists of 114 surahs:

The Basmala is the opening formula of the surahs, so at first one would expect to see 114 Basmalas at the beginning of 114 surahs.

But that is not what we find.

There is no Basmala at the beginning of surah 9. The openings therefore contain 113 Basmalas rather than 114. In a book whose first sentence has 19 letters and whose number of surahs is a multiple of 19, this apparent absence naturally draws attention.

The text, however, does not end there. In verse 27:30, we encounter a second Basmala that is not a surah opening. It appears again within Solomon’s letter.

The apparently missing Basmala is thus restored elsewhere in the text:

Moreover, counting inclusively from surah 9 to surah 27 gives exactly 19 surahs.

There is one more detail: the additional Basmala occurs in verse 30 of surah 27. Adding the surah and verse numbers gives:

The striking absence at the beginning of surah 9 therefore does not look like a defect that simply disrupts the system. Instead, it opens another layer showing how the number 19 is woven into the Quran’s physical arrangement.

Sign 3: Four words, 19 letters and 786

Let us return to the main table. We know three basic facts about the complete Basmala: 4 words, 19 letters and a total Abjad value of 786.

These are not arbitrary figures chosen by us; they are direct properties of the sentence.

Write the three values side by side without changing their order:

The resulting number is divisible by 19 without a remainder:

In the first sign, only the letter count was 19. Now the word count, letter count and Abjad value of the whole sentence form a single number, and the result again points to 19.

You may still call it an attractive coincidence. Let us continue.

Sign 4: Nineteen appears not once, but three times

The Basmala is the first verse of the Quran, so its verse number is 1. It has 19 letters, and the four words contain 3, 4, 6 and 6 letters respectively.

Write these figures in the same order:

Now divide this number by 19:

It divides exactly. Divide it by 19 once more:

Again it divides exactly. Once more:

There is still no remainder.

I do not want to dismiss this simply by calling it ‘the cube of 19.’ The striking point is not the name of the formula: the resulting number is divisible by 19 three consecutive times. Remove one layer and 19 lies beneath it; remove another and there is 19 again; remove a third and once more there is 19.

The number 19 seems to run through the very marrow of this number.

And we are still using only the most basic properties of a four-word sentence.

Let us go deeper. The first four signs used the sentence’s most basic parameters. From this point, word order, cumulative letter counts and Abjad values also enter the picture. The data will not change; we will simply view the same sentence from different angles.

Sign 5: When word order is included

The words of the Basmala are ordered 1, 2, 3 and 4, and their letter counts are 3, 4, 6 and 6. Write each word’s order number immediately beside its letter count:

The resulting number is divisible not only once but twice by 19.

Sign 6: When the letters accumulate

The first word has 3 letters. At the end of the second word the cumulative total is 7, at the end of the third it is 13, and at the end of the Basmala it is 19. Write these cumulative values together with the word positions:

Again there is no remainder.

Sign 7: This time, the Abjad values of the words

Now set the letter counts aside and use the word values already shown in the table. The word positions are 1, 2, 3 and 4; the corresponding values are 102, 66, 329 and 289:

Read through the numerical values of the same four words, the resulting long number is again exactly divisible by 19.

Sign 8: When the Abjad values accumulate

Now add the word values cumulatively: 102 after the first word, 168 after the second, 497 after the third and 786 when the whole Basmala is complete:

The cumulative reading does not disturb the result.

Sign 9: Combining letter count and Abjad value in one figure

For each word, add its letter count to its Abjad value. This gives 105, 70, 335 and 295. When these four new values are written together with the word positions:

The resulting number is again divisible by 19 without a remainder.

Sign 10: What if we use only the first and last letters?

We will not even use each complete word. Add only the Abjad values of the first and last letters of the four words. This produces 42, 6, 51 and 41 respectively:

Even when we look only at the boundary letters of the sentence, the same common number appears again.

So far we have treated each word as a whole. We will now open the Basmala letter by letter. The numbers will become longer, but the method remains unchanged, and every part of each long number will be shown clearly.

Sign 11: Opening the words letter by letter

Write the order number of each word and then list the Abjad values of its letters one by one. This forms a 37-digit number:

When every letter is made visible, the result is still exactly divisible by 19.

Sign 12: Adding each letter’s position within its word

This time, before each letter’s Abjad value, write that letter’s position within its own word: first letter, second letter, third letter, and so on. The data grows, but nothing used here comes from outside the sentence:

The resulting 56-digit number is also divisible by 19 without a remainder.

Sign 13: This time, the overall position within the Basmala

Beside each letter’s Abjad value, write its position in the entire Basmala. The first letter is 1 and the last is 19, bringing each letter’s value and its place in the sentence into the same sequence:

Again, the result is exactly divisible by 19.

Sign 14: Adding the word number to the sequence

Keep the preceding sequence unchanged, adding only the word’s order number at the end of each word:

The new information added to the arrangement does not disturb the pattern of 19.

Sign 15: Replacing the word number with the word’s total value

Now remove those word numbers and replace them with the words’ total Abjad values: 102, 66, 329 and 289.

Once again, exact divisibility.

Sign 16: Placing the same values at the beginning of the words

We do not change the data. We simply move the word totals—102, 66, 329 and 289—to the beginning of their respective words:

The position changes; divisibility by 19 does not.

Sign 17: Letter count, total value and individual letters

This time, each word is represented on three levels: first its letter count, then its total Abjad value, and finally the Abjad values of its individual letters:

The resulting number is again an exact multiple of 19.

Sign 18: The same information in a different order

In the previous sign, the word’s total Abjad value preceded its letters. Now place that same value at the end of the word, changing nothing else:

And the result is once again divisible by 19 without a remainder.

For the final three signs, let us change perspective once more. Alongside numerical letter values, we will now use only physical positions within the sentence and word counts across the Quran.

Sign 19: Representing the words only by letter positions

Number the Basmala’s 19 letters from 1 to 19. The four words are then represented by 123, 4567, 8910111213 and 141516171819. Adding these four representative numbers gives:

No Abjad value is used here. The positions of the letters within the sentence are sufficient.

Sign 20: Adding word order to the end of the position sequence

Now write the previous position representations side by side and append the word’s order number to each one:

This new number, constructed only from the positions and word order of the same 19 letters, is also exactly divisible by 19.

Sign 21: The echo of the four words across the Quran

Finally, trace the four principal words of the Basmala throughout the Quran. According to the counting data used here, Ism, Allah, Al-Rahman and Al-Rahim occur 19, 2,698, 57 and 114 times respectively. Strikingly, the same figures also appear among certain divine names whose Abjad values are multiples of 19:

This final table no longer concerns only the internal structure of the four-word sentence; it considers how the Basmala’s words occur across the Quran as a whole.

Now let us return to where we began.

We had only four words and 19 letters: at first glance, a very limited set of data—order numbers, letter counts, positions and historical numerical values.

But as we opened the sentence one layer at a time, the number 19 appeared again and again: directly in the letter count, in the Quran’s physical arrangement, in sequences of word and letter values, and even in the positions of the letters alone.

We are not speaking of one result. We are speaking of many structures generated from different, clearly defined properties of the same four words, all pointing to the same number.

And this was only the book’s first technical section.

If the Basmala is the sentence that opens the Quran’s door, the mark of 19 is already visible upon that door.