Day 1: The Numerical Miracle of “Mercy” in the Quran
For the first-ever article I am writing on “Daily Wonders”, I decided to pick a topic that seems to present itself rather naturally. And what is more natural than opening the Qur’an to its first page and reading its very first verse (i.e., “sentence”)?
This is what we see — a declaration full of “Mercy”:
بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
In the Name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful
One curious aspect of this opening declaration is that it describes Allah (God) with two of His Divine Names — ar-Rahman (ٱلرَّحْمَـٰنِ), ar-Rahim (ٱلرَّحِيمِ) — that are from the very same root of “Rahmah” or “Mercy”.
So, here is my simple idea:
Take the three-letter Arabic root for “Mercy” (Ra-Ha-Mim— ر ح م ), which as we just saw appears twice in the first sentence (!) of the Qur’an alone. Use it as inspiration to do an unapologetically “mechanical” analysis of the frequency of occurrence of words derived from this root (verb/adjective/noun/etc) in the Qur’an.
This modest effort turns out to reveal some findings that is nothing but modest: a series of “sweet wonders” to cherish and appreciate in awe.
Let’s begin.
All the statistics and counts mentioned below are from the publicly-available, open-source Quranic Arabic Corpus project.
First; Some Key Facts from Corpus
Although the Corpus page for root Rā-Hā-Mīm contains a wealth of information, the short summary of facts at the top of its page will be more than sufficient to see some remarkable numerical “wonders”.
Let’s begin with these facts:
Root Ra-Ha-Mim(ر ح م) occurs 339 times in the Quran in nine forms.
Four forms account for the bulk (93%) of this total:
Raḥmat (رَحْمَة): 114 times (infinitive — “Mercy”)
Raḥmān (رَّحْمَٰن): 57 times (noun/adj. — “The Most Compassionate”)
Raḥīm (رَّحِيم): 116 times (noun/adj. — “The Most Merciful”)
Raḥima (رَّحِمَ): 28 times (verb — “to have/bestow mercy”)
Some eagle-eyed readers might already have noticed some patterns. But let’s hold off for a moment and add one more — and very well-known — fact:
The Qur’an has 114 chapters. Yes, 114.
Now let’s look back at the list above. What do you see?
Raḥmat/Mercy: occurs 114 times — exactly one per chapter! (To be painfully pedantic, 114 “Rahmat”/114 sūrahs = 1.00)
Raḥmān: occurs 57 times — precisely ½ of 114 — averaging exactly 1/2 per chapter! (again, 57/114 = 0.50)
Raḥīm: occurs 116 times— averaging a hair above one per chapter. (116/114 = 1.0175 to be exact — keep this in mind.)
Raḥima — verb form: 28 times. Note that 114/4= 57/2= 28.5. So, 28 (or 29) is as close as an integer can get to this figure!
So, #Rahima= 28 ~ #Rahman/2 (57/2) = #Rahmat/4 (114/4)
I can stop here and start discussing how minuscule the likelihood of these occurrences falling in exact multiples of each other like this and all of them being anchored by the total number of chapters in the Qur’an… but before I do that, perhaps you are wondering why I left the count of Raḥīm out. After all, isn’t 116 almost 114? How much more can we expect?
With the Qur’an, we always expect more. Over and over what we witness and therefore became a firm conviction for us is that the Qur’an never gets something “almost” right.Or “nearly” perfect.
For those of us who believe in this maxim, the 116 count of Rahīm looks very suspicious. If it were 79 or 130 or 152 or any other number that is not so extremely close to 114 — and if we had not already seen the other three forms — Rahmat, Rahman, & Rahima — in such precise alignment that they cannot possibly get any closer, perhaps we would not get this nagging feeling.
When the Qur’an shows you something that is almost perfect — but isn’t — it is always an invitation to the sincerely curious ones to think a bit harder before it reveals its surprise. And so shall we do.
(Check out the article “La Luna: A Bite-Size Lunar Miracle” for another example of this.)
To satisfy our curiosity, we go through the list of 116 verses in the Corpus page in which ar-Rahim occurs, and we notice two things:
First, in Sūrat at-Tawbah, verse 128, “Rahīm” is used not in reference to God, but in a very rare (and famous) occurrence, it is used as an exalting description of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) — as the Prophet of Mercy:
لَقَدْ جَآءَكُمْ رَسُولٌۭ مِّنْ أَنفُسِكُمْ عَزِيزٌ عَلَيْهِ مَا عَنِتُّمْ حَرِيصٌ عَلَيْكُم بِٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ رَءُوفٌۭرَّحِيمٌۭ
There certainly has come to you a Messenger from among yourselves. He is deeply concerned by your suffering, anxious for your well-being, and gracious and merciful to the believers.
Second, in another famous occasion, in Sūrat al-Fath, verse 29, a plural adjective form of rahīm — ruhamā — is used to describe the Companions of Prophet Muhammad:
مُّحَمَّدٌۭ رَّسُولُ ٱللَّهِ ۚ وَٱلَّذِينَ مَعَهُۥٓ أَشِدَّآءُ عَلَى ٱلْكُفَّارِ رُحَمَآءُ بَيْنَهُمْ
Muḥammad is the Messenger of Allah. And those with him are firm with the disbelievers1 and compassionate with one another.
Compare this to the other forms we mentioned above. For example, every single of the 57 “Rahman”s occurrences above are in reference to God, as a Divine Name, whereas in these two verses Rahīm is used in reference to human beings. Excluding them from the list leaves precisely 114 occurrences of Rahīm used for God in the Qur’an.
With this, we can revise our conclusion above:
#Rahima = 28 ~#Rahman/2 (57/2) =
#Rahīm/4 = #Rahmat/4 = #Sūrahs/4 (114/4)
As hard as it already is to believe that these perfect alignments can even be real, the way each total (114, 57, 28 etc) is distributed across sūrahs and pages is even more stunning.
To give one example: All 57 occurrences of “ar-Rahman” occur in only 18 chapters, and nine of those have only one appearance each (yep ½ again). This group includes the longest surah in the Qur’an, al-Baqarah (Q2:163) as well as the sūrah whose very name is “Rahman”!
The remaining 48 appear in the remaining 9 chapters — with a full 16 of them (yep 1/3 exactly!) occurring in one single surah — Sūrah Maryam which is only about seven pages long. Another seven occur in Sūrat al-Zukhruf, which is even shorter.
Here is another angle — just as curious: Of the 57 total appearances (of Rahman), only five of them are in the first half of the Qur’an (first 300 pages! —), with the second half containing a whopping 52 appearances — yes, almost 10 times more!
(Side note: This fact is just the tip of the iceberg: the first & second halves of the Qur’an are significantly different from each other. A fact completely overlooked by scholars and a much longer topic for another day).
The bottom line is that there is nothing “even” about the distribution of these forms of the root Ra-Ha-Ma across surahs, across pages, yet their totals in the Qur’an miraculously align perfectly, adding up with such precision that leaves anyone with a functioning mind speechless.
How is Any of this possible??
In a book revealed over 23 years? Four forms of the root for Mercy referring to God, all aligning in perfect proportion with each other — as well as with the number of chapters of the book itself?
If the Qur’an was the product of human hands or minds, what are we supposed to think? That someone was hand-counting and keeping track of each occurrence of each form of the root for Mercy and adjusting their numbers to align them as they did and anchor them to the total number of chapters? All the while writing beautifully eloquent verses that are also full of wisdom, mercy, and guidance? And hundreds of pages of laws to govern everything from inheritance to marriage, divorce, war, and so on?
The idea is so absurd that it doesn’t even warrant a response but consider that:
The number of verses and chapters were constantly increasing as the Prophet was receiving more revelations, so what number to match would not be determined until (near) the end of his worldly life.
Revelations were written on fragments and pieces of lamb skins, which were then kept by a large number of scribes, and few if anybody other than the Prophet had the entire Qur’an memorized in real time. So, how would one keep count of the totals? (and didn't they have better things to do with their very scarce times??)
As absurd as this will sound, let’s suppose for a moment that they somehow managed to pull off this most delicate logistical feat; recall that Ra-Ha-Ma was just the first root that we encountered in the Qur’an and started studying. There are several hundred similarly perfect alignments that I have come across just myself and documented in a just a few years (and will inshallah publish as I get the chance ). What do we imagine — that they were running a AI data centres with millions of NVIDIA chips in the desert just to impress future generations with numerical miracles? OK, this did sound absurd.
Let me conclude with one more bit of curiosity for you.
Remember from the Corpus summary above that the root Ra-Ha-Ma occurs 339 times in the Quran in 9 forms. So far, we have focused on the four forms that occurred most frequently, which included two crucial Divine names.
If we add up the four counts we listed above, we get:
114 + 57 + 116 + 28 = 315
Which leaves 339 - 315 = 24 occurrences for the remaining five forms.
Look at how they are distributed:
Arḥām (أرْحام): 12 times (noun: womb/relatives)
Rāḥimīn (رَّٰحِمِين): 6 times (active participle: mercifuls)
Arḥam (أَرْحَم): 4 times (noun: more/most merciful)
Ruḥ'm (رُحْم): 1 time (noun: mercy — for human)
Marḥamat (مَرْحَمَة): 1 time (noun: compassion — used for humans)
24: 12 + 6 + 4 + 1 + 1 — Even this has a very nice flow to it.
Oh, and it just happens that 339 = 3 × 113.
What is 113? It is the number of Chapters in the Qur’an that begin with the Basmala: بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ. Remember, the declaration that we began this article with? Which contains two Divine Names from the root Ra-Ha-Ma.
The Basmala occurs at the beginning of every one of the 114 sūrahs in the Qur’an, except just one: Sūrat at-Tawbah — an absence that puzzled scholars from the very beginning and still does not have a satisfactory explanation.
In other words, there are 113 chapters that begin with two Divine Names from the root Ra-Ha-Ma, and the total number of occurrences of all nine forms of the same root in the Quran is precisely triple that figure 3 × 113 =339.
One final comment: This last fact does not take away from the special place of the figure 114 in the Qur’an. In fact, the Qur’an makes for the “missing” Basmala in Sūrat at-Tawbah, by including an extra one later in the text of Sūrat #27, an-Naml (verse 30) — as the opening phrase of a letter Prophet Sulayman (Solomon) writes to Queen Saba/Shaba — completing the total number of Basmalas in the Qur’an to exactly 114!
There is more to say on this but that’s for another time inshallah.
(p.s. The only opening Basmala that counts as a verse is the one in the first sūrah, al-Fātiha. The other 112 do not enter the counts shown above — otherwise the Corpus count would have been higher by 2 × 112 =224 than 339.)