of the Quran offered by the people of falsehood by saying: “The Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and the Companions did not know the interpretation of the ambiguous passages of the Quran.” This impugns the Messenger and the early generations of the Muslim community in a way that may be more serious than a particular group’s mistaken interpretation of some verses. A sensible person does not build a palace by demolishing a city.

The third view is that the ambiguous passages are the disconnected letters at the beginning of certain surahs. This is reported from Ibn Abbās. On this view, the disconnected letters do not constitute complete utterances, whether nominal or verbal sentences. Rather, they are names pronounced in their pausal forms. This is why they have no grammatical inflection: inflection arises only when words are joined in a syntactic construction. They are simply pronounced in their pausal forms, as when one says: alif, bā, tā, thā. Hence they are written as letter symbols, not as the names pronounced, for in speech they are names.

Thus, when al-Khalīl asked his companions how to pronounce the letter zāy in Zayd, they said, “Zā.” He replied, “You have pronounced its name; the letter itself is pronounced ‘zahhi.’” Thus, in speech they are names, while in writing they are disconnected letters: (a-l-m). They are not written out as alif, lām, mīm, as the names are written in the saying of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace:

“Whoever recites the Quran with correct articulation will receive ten good deeds for every letter. I do not mean that Alif-Lām-Mīm is one letter; rather, alif is a letter, lām is a letter, and mīm is a letter.”

In the usage of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and his Companions, the term harf encompasses what grammarians call nouns, verbs, and particles. Hence Sībawayh said when classifying speech: