ten good deeds. I do not say that alif-lām-mīm is one letter; rather, alif is a letter, lām is a letter, and mīm is a letter.”

[Al-Khalīl asked his companions to pronounce the letter zāy in Zayd. They replied, “Zāy.” He said, “You have given its name; the letter itself is ‘z’.”] (*)

The grammarians subsequently adopted the convention of calling what ordinary Arabic calls a harf a kalimah (word), and of reserving the term harf (particle) for something that conveys a meaning but is neither a noun nor a verb, such as prepositions and similar particles. As for the spoken letters of the alphabet, the term harf sometimes denotes the actual letter within an utterance and sometimes the name of that letter. When this convention became predominant, those accustomed to it began to imagine that this was also how these terms were used in ordinary Arabic. Some of them consider kalimah to have more than one meaning in Arabic, denoting, for example, both a noun and a sentence. Yet in unambiguous Arabic usage, kalimah is known only in the sense of a complete sentence.

The point here is that the prescribed remembrance of Allah, glorified is He, consists of remembering Him through “a complete sentence.” This is what is termed kalām (speech), an individual instance of which is called a kalimah. It is this that benefits hearts and brings reward and recompense, nearness to Allah, knowledge of Him, love for Him, fear of Him, and other lofty aims and noble objectives.

As for restricting oneself to “an isolated name,” whether stated explicitly or represented by a pronoun, this has no foundation, let alone being a form of remembrance particular to the spiritual elite and those who know Allah. Rather, it leads to various innovations and forms of misguidance, and opens the way to conceiving corrupt spiritual states of the kind found among those who deviate from the faith and those who profess divine union, as has been discussed at length elsewhere.