Many think they have the key to the puzzle, but it remains the most mystifying part of the Qur'an.

What does it mean, Alif-Lam-Mim?

A one thousand four hundred year old conundrum, but can it be solved? And are we meant to solve it?

The Qur'anic code

Much has been written about the letters prefixing some of the surahs (chapters) in the Qur'an (Koran). However, none of this writing has produced a definitive answer about what these letter prefixes mean. Some have accepted that they are an unsolvable mystery known only to God; others have delved into numerical analysis and 'discovered' that everything in the Qur'an is somehow divisible by nineteen.

I accept neither that the mystery is unsolvable, nor that everything is divisible by nineteen, despite the huge amount of '19' related miracles found. Having worked for three years on another cunning mystery, I found it amazing what people discovered that wasn't actually there (myself included). The problem with 19 is that every 19th investigation will yield something divisible by 19. This does not make each one a miracle, even though some of the findings do indeed appear to be so.

What is the Qur'an?

It is the word of God, the holy book of Islam and the final revelation to mankind. It was delivered over a period of twenty two years, between 610 and 632 AD, through the prophet Mohammed. Only after his death was the Qur'an written down, though instructions for its compilation from an otherwise oral tradition were left by the Prophet.

Many confounding theories over the correctness of the text exist. Some claim there were seven different readings, others that parts were forgotten, and that they were meant to be forgotten as they were superseded by subsequent revelation. One claim is that two verses were added at the end of Surah 9 by the compilers, to honour the Prophet. Each of these, and many more claims, are supported by the practices, recollections and sayings of the prophet and his companions, recorded and known as the Sunnah (actions of the Prophet) and Hadith (sayings of the Prophet).

What is the code?

The Qur'an is composed of 114 surahs. Some of these surahs are prefixed with between 1 and 5 arabic letters, as shown in the table below.

The arabic alphabet is composed of 29 letters including Hamza, and 29 of the 114 surahs are prefixed with 14 of these letters. The alphabet is shown below, reading right to left. Alif is the first letter, and Ya the last. Hamza is shown after the Ya.

The prefixed letters have been suggested to be phonetic sounds, keys, letter values and gematical (or gematrial) values. Gematria is the assignation of numerical values to alphabetic letters: a system in use long before we had arabic (0 to 9) numerals. They are called arabic as they came to Europe through the Islamic Mathematician Al Khwarizami, although he got them from the Hindus.

In the days before arabic numerals, the islamic alphabet itself had a different letter order from that shown above, so the gematical/gematrial values are as follows. Gematria applies equally to many alphabets before arabic numerals, i.e. greek, latin and hebrew. gematria does not extend to Roman numerals I=1, V=5, X=10, C=100 etc, which originated similarly to tally marks, but the idea is the same - a letter represents a number.

Numbers and prefixes in other traditions

114 is the same number as the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, a comparatively rough rendering of Christ's sayings, thought by some to be the 'Q' book from which other gospels were derived. I have also heard mention of the psalms of David being prefixed with letter 'codes'. 19 is considered a foundational number in Buddhism, and it is a prime number.

The long first step

To be able to analyze the Qur'an it must be computerized and done so accurately.

Rendering the Qur'an in unicode is a particularly difficult task for two reasons:

1. It is written in an older style of Arabic than is currently used, with many additions to help the reader with pronunciation
2. Unicode does not fully support the style of the Qur'an, and the various implementations of unicode in modern computer fonts do not necessarily adhere fully to the unicode standard.

A few gotchas I have come across

• Alif Wasla is missing from Arial and Times New Roman, the most common Windows fonts
• Putting a khasra after a shadda renders in a browser with the khasra above the letter, making it look more like a fatha, although in modern usage this is correct.
• It's hard to know what to do with some of the hamzas and other 'pronunciation' marks
• There are many renderings of unicode Quran's on the internet. Despite this, they appear to have come from only two or three sources. One source has listed all the alif hints as full alifs. I have taken all versions, compared them electronically and written out their agreements and corrected their disagreements according to the standard rendering of the Quran Complex (www.qurancomplex.org). They are all quite accurate, but not perfect. I expect my own efforts will not reach perfection, but move some way further towards it.
• I have not yet figured out how to render Lam-Alifs with all of the extra marks correctly 
• There are two renderings of sukun in the Qur'an; only one is available in unicode

The result is far from ideal when compared to a modern Qur'an, but according to some sources, the original rendered Qur'an had no hamzas, no pronunciation marks, and in some cases no dots to help differentiate the letters. Some of these early Qur'ans are available for viewing at the British Library's website (http://www.bl.uk)

Here is the output so far in XML with three english translations from Yusuf Ali, Shakir and Pickthall. Completed Surahs show as a hyperlink. Those not yet completed are plain text.