with what he cannot bear.

The author then adduces the words of the Exalted: “Ta Ha. We did not send down the Quran to you for you to be distressed” (Ta Ha 20:1–2). “Ta Ha” consists of two Arabic letters, ṭāʾ and hāʾ; it is not, as some have imagined, one of the Prophet’s names. Rather, it belongs to the disjointed letters with which Allah opens certain chapters of His noble Book. Taken in isolation these letters have no lexical meaning, for the Quran was revealed in Arabic, and in Arabic individual alphabetic letters carry no meaning unless they are combined to form a word.

Yet they carry a momentous implication: an explicit challenge to those who denied the Messenger ﷺ. These deniers proved incapable of producing anything like the Quran—neither a chapter, nor ten chapters, nor even a single verse. What is more, the Quran that so confounded them did not employ strange letters unfamiliar to them; it used the very letters with which they themselves construct their speech.

For this reason, you will hardly find a surah that begins with these disjointed letters without an immediate reference to the Quran. In al-Baqarah: “Alif Lām Mīm. That is the Book in which there is no doubt.” In Āl-‘Imrān: “Alif Lām Mīm. Allah—there is no deity except Him, the Living, the Sustainer. He has sent down to you the Book in truth.” In al-A‘rāf: “Alif Lām Mīm Ṣād. A Book revealed to you—so let there not be any distress in your chest because of it.” In Yūnus: “Alif Lām Rā. These are the verses of the Wise Book.” Thus, after every set of disjointed letters at the opening of a chapter comes a mention of the Quran, signifying that this Revelation is composed of the very letters that form the language of the Arabs, yet in spite of that it left them powerless