over wording, wherever disagreement actually exists; praise be to Allah, there is no genuine disagreement in meaning between them. The person who said that a letter is one and the same, and that the letters of the alphabet are uncreated, meant only that they form part of Allah’s speech, are drawn from Allah’s speech, and constitute the elements of its wording, which is uncreated. There is no dispute about this.
An isolated letter, however, exists neither in the Quran nor elsewhere. A letter is pronounced only within combinations forming nouns, verbs, or particles. As for letters pronounced individually, such as alif, lām, mīm, and the like, these are actually the names of letters. They are called letters after what they designate, just as daraba (“he struck”) is called a past-tense verb by reference to what it designates. Thus, when al-Khalīl asked his companions, “How do you pronounce the z in Zayd?” they replied, “We say ‘zā.’” He said, “You have given its name; rather, one says ‘zah.’”
Only half of the alphabet’s letter-names occur in the Quran: fourteen letters. These represent half of the various classes of letters: those pronounced with the breath restrained, those pronounced with the breath flowing, those articulated with the tongue raised, emphatic letters, stops, continuants, and the other classes of letters. This is the nobler of the two halves. The other half occurs in the Quran only within nouns, verbs, or particles—which are neither nouns nor verbs. We must therefore not suppose that all the letters of the alphabet occur by name in the Quran; rather, the letters of the alphabet themselves, which