Are the isolated alphabetic characters that appear at the beginnings of certain sūrahs in single-letter form—such as “Ṣād” (ص) and “Nūn” (ن)—to be classified as mere letters or as words?

I answer: They are words, not letters. A true letter is never paused upon; it cannot stand alone visually, nor can it be written apart from what it is joined to. These opening characters, however, are recited with a full stop, written separately, and occupy a distinct line exactly as words do. For that reason they are treated as words rather than letters.

Abū ʿAmr added: The term harf may, in other contexts, carry the sense of “way” or “aspect.” The Exalted says, “Among mankind are those who worship Allah upon a harf” (22:11), meaning upon a particular path and disposition. Likewise the Prophet ﷺ said, “The Qur’an was revealed upon seven aḥruf,” that is, seven modes of Arabic speech. Allah knows best.

Section: Have any words occurred in the Qur’an that fall outside the dialects of the Arabs, or not?

The leading scholars concur that no sentence in the Qur’an is framed according to non-Arabic syntactic patterns, though it does contain proper names belonging to people whose native tongues were not Arabic, such as Israel, Gabriel, ʿImrān, Noah, and Lot. They differ only over the presence of non-proper nouns. Judge Abū Bakr ibn al-Ṭayyib, al-Ṭabarī, and others denied their existence, insisting that the Qur’an is pure, manifest Arabic, and that any term alleged to belong to another language simply happens to be shared by several tongues, so that Arabs, Persians, Abyssinians, and others all used it. A second group affirmed that such words do exist, but maintained that because they are few they do not strip the Qur’an of its status as clear Arabic, nor the Messenger of Allah of speaking in the language of his people.

Examples include: al-mishkāt, “the niche”; nashaʾa, “he rose at night,” as in “Indeed, the rising of the night” (73:6); kiflayn, “a double share,” as in “He will grant you a double share” (57:28); and qaswarah, “a lion,” as in “fleeing from a lion” (74:51)—all Abyssinian in origin.

al-ghassāq denotes a cold, foul liquid in Turkish; al-qisṭās means “the balance” in the language of the Byzantines; al-sijjīl, “stone and clay,” is Persian; aṭ-ṭūr, “mountain,” and al-yamm, “sea,” are Syriac; while at-tannūr, “the surface of the earth,” is from a general foreign tongue.

Ibn ʿAṭiyyah said: “In reality these expressions were originally foreign, yet the Arabs adopted and naturalized them, so they have become Arabic on that account. The pure Arabs, in whose language the Qur’an was revealed, had some contact with other tongues by reason of Quraysh’s two commercial journeys, and through travels such as that of Musāfir ibn Abī ʿAmr to Syria …”