Some numbers recur in the Quran: seven heavens, the seven verses of al-Fatihah, 114 surahs. Since the 1970s one number has drawn more attention than any other. The Egyptian-American biochemist Rashad Khalifa ran the Quran's text through a computer and reported that its words and letters are built on nineteen, the number in "It is overseen by nineteen" (Quran 74:30). His findings, often called Code 19, are still widely shared.
This page counts the best-known of them, states the rule each count needs, and then runs a test named before counting: are the Quran's counts multiples of nineteen, or of seven, more often than chance would make them? The two counters at the bottom of the page let you check every number here.
Where nineteen comes from
"It is overseen by nineteen [keepers]. We have appointed only [stern] angels as wardens of the Fire. And We have made their number only as a test for the disbelievers, so that the People of the Book will be certain, and the believers will increase in faith." (Quran 74:30-31)
The passage says what the nineteen are: the angels set over the Fire. It says why their number is given: as a test, which some will believe and others will mock. Khalifa read the number as a key to the whole text. The verses themselves do not say that, and it was not how the early commentators read them.
How the counts were made
Words are counted as written between spaces, in the Uthmani text of the Madinah Mushaf in the reading of Hafs, the text on this site's Quran pages. Letters are counted as written: every letter on the line, with alif counted once in all its forms. The small alif written above a letter, as in ar-Rahman, is not counted. Counting letters as pronounced adds it, and that rule gives different totals. Verse numbers follow the Kufan count, which this text uses. The other early counting traditions divide some verses differently, so a claim about verse totals holds only for the count it was made in. Word occurrences, such as how often ar-Rahman appears, come from the grammatical corpus used on the word-count page.
The claims, counted
| Claim | Counted | Verdict | Check |
|---|---|---|---|
| The basmala has 19 letters | 19 as written; 20 as pronounced | Holds, counting letters as written | Count it |
| The Quran has 114 surahs, 19 × 6 | 114 | Holds | |
| The basmala occurs 114 times, 19 × 6 | 114: as verse 1:1, at the head of 112 other surahs, and within 27:30. Surah 9 has none. | Holds | 27:30 |
| Surah 96, the first revealed, has 19 verses | 19 | Holds | Count it |
| Surah 96 is 19th from the end of the Quran | 19th | Holds | |
| Its first five verses, the first revelation, have 19 words | 20 | Does not hold | Count it |
| Those five verses have 76 letters, 19 × 4 | 76 as written; 78 as pronounced | Holds, counting letters as written | Count it |
| Surah 96 has 285 letters, 19 × 15 | 285 as written; 299 as pronounced | Holds, counting letters as written | Count it |
| The word ism ("name") occurs 19 times | 27 in the singular; 22 without an attached pronoun; 39 in every form | Does not hold under any of these rules | Count it |
| The word Allah occurs 2,698 times, 19 × 142 | 2,699 | Holds only if a verse is removed. 2,698 needs 9:129, which contains the name once, to be taken out of the Quran | Count it |
| Ar-Rahman occurs 57 times, 19 × 3 | 57 | Holds | Count it |
| Ar-Rahim occurs 114 times, 19 × 6 | 115 in the singular, one of which (9:128) describes the Prophet; 114 as a name of God | Holds, counting it as a name of God | Count it |
| The letter qaf (ق) occurs 57 times in Surah Qaf (50), 19 × 3 | 57 | Holds, counting letters as written | Count it |
| … and 57 times in Surah ash-Shura (42), whose opening letters include it | 57 | Holds, counting letters as written | Count it |
| The letter nun (ن) occurs 133 times in Surah al-Qalam (68), 19 × 7 | 131 | Holds only if the single letter that opens the surah is counted as the three letters of its name, نون | Count it |
Several of the findings are accurate as stated: the basmala's nineteen letters, ar-Rahman's 57, qaf's 57 in both of its surahs, Surah 96's nineteen verses and 285 letters. Others hold only under a rule chosen for them: letters as written rather than as pronounced, the opening nun spelled out, ar-Rahim as a name of God. Two fail: the first revelation has twenty words, not nineteen, and ism does not reach nineteen under any rule tried.
Sevens and the number 114 appear too. Al-Fatihah has seven verses, "the seven often-repeated verses" (Quran 15:87); the counting traditions divide it differently but all give seven. "Seven heavens" occurs seven times, and "mercy" 114 times; both are counted on the word-count page.
The two verses that did not fit
The count of Allah is the centre of the theory, and it does not divide by nineteen: the name occurs 2,699 times. Khalifa's answer was to declare the last two verses of Surah at-Tawbah (Quran 9:128-129) an addition to the Quran, since removing them took the count to 2,698, nineteen times 142. He later claimed to be a messenger of God himself. Muslim scholars rejected both claims.
The two verses are in every complete manuscript and every recitation of the Quran. Sahih al-Bukhari records the moment they were written into its first collected copy: Zayd ibn Thabit, gathering the Quran under Abu Bakr, found "the last Verse of Surat at-Tauba" with Abu Khuzaymah al-Ansari (Sahih al-Bukhari 4986). A code that holds only after the text is changed is not a feature of the text.
A test named in advance
Any count has a one in nineteen chance of being a multiple of nineteen, and a one in seven chance of being a multiple of seven. With enough counts to choose from, multiples are easy to find. The question is whether the Quran's counts produce them more often than chance does, and only counts chosen before looking can answer it.
Four sets of counts were fixed, with the letter rule, before any was computed: the verses, words and letters of each of the 114 surahs, and how often each of the 100 most frequent nouns and names occurs.
| Counts | How many | Multiples of 19 | Multiples of 7 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verses in each surah | 114 | 4 (chance: 6) | 14 (chance: 16.3) |
| Words in each surah | 114 | 6 (chance: 6) | 14 (chance: 16.3) |
| Letters in each surah | 114 | 9 (chance: 6) | 13 (chance: 16.3) |
| Occurrences of the 100 commonest nouns | 100 | 7 (chance: 5.3) | 17 (chance: 14.3) |
Across all 442 counts, 26 are multiples of nineteen, where chance predicts about 23, and 58 are multiples of seven, where chance predicts about 63. No set stands out from chance. The largest excess, nine letter totals against six expected, would happen by chance about one time in seven. The Quran's totals as counted here, 6,236 verses, 77,430 words and 325,386 letters, are multiples of neither nineteen nor seven. (The grammatical corpus divides one word in 2:181 differently and counts 77,429 words; neither total is a multiple.)
What this shows
Nineteen does occur in the Quran's counts, at about the rate any number would. Some of Khalifa's findings are accurate and anyone can check them. They are the matches a search through many counts will find, not signs of a structure that runs through the text. The theory needed a rule chosen for each claim, and in the end needed two verses removed.
The verse that names nineteen gives the number its own purpose: the wardens of the Fire, and a test of how people receive what they cannot verify. The Quran's challenge to its doubters is to "produce a surah like it" (Quran 2:23), a challenge of language and guidance, not arithmetic. The wider objection is answered in Do numerical and ring-composition miracles prove the Quran divine?
Sources
- Quran text: the Uthmani script of the Madinah Mushaf (King Fahd Complex), reading of Hafs, as published by quran.com; translations from The Clear Quran, Dr. Mustafa Khattab
- Word occurrences: Quranic Arabic Corpus, morphology version 0.4, Kais Dukes, University of Leeds, corpus.quran.com, with the corrections at github.com/mustafa0x/quran-morphology
- The compilation of the Quran under Abu Bakr: Sahih al-Bukhari 4986
- The test named in advance:
scripts/quran/multiples-test.mjs, with the counts and the letter rule fixed before counting