Abstract:

At the beginning of twenty-nine chapters (surah) in the Qur’an, there are letters called hurūf muqatta’a “disjoined letters” after the Bismillah Islamic phrase and read one by one with their names in the alphabet. These letters have attracted people’s attention since the first day they were revealed, and their exact meaning has been a matter of curiosity. Some have counted these letters as mutashabihat (cognate) whose meanings cannot be known by anyone but Allah. Some of them said that the meanings of these letters can be known because the Qur’an was revealed in an understandable and clear language, and they put forward many opinions about their meanings. Tunisian mufassir (exegete) al-Tāhir Ibn Āshūr’s (1879-1973) gathered the approaches related to these letters in twenty-one views in his thirty-volume work called al-Tahrīr wa’l-Tanwīr. In this study, Ibn Āshūr’s views and analyses - both at the beginning of the surah of al-Baqara and in other parts of his tafsir - on hurūf muqatta’a will be discussed. Thus, the author’s approach to issues such as the composition, pronunciation, writing of these letters, their ratio to other dialects and their existence as separate verses will be tried to determine. In this context, Ibn Āshūr’s unique attitude, which prioritizes the rhetorical, pedagogical, and incapacitating (tahaddi) aspect of these letters by avoiding the repetition of the previous ones on the subject of hurūf muqatta’a will be pointed out.

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