In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

Over it is 19

[74:36] A warning to the human race.
[74:37] For those among you who wish to advance, or regress.

God, the Almighty, the Creator of all things, composed the entire Arabic text of the Quran with a remarkable mathematical intricacy. The basis of this mathematical system is the number 19. Virtually every element of the Quran contains 19 as the common denominator. For example, the number of suras (chapters) in the Quran is 114, or 19x6. The total number of verses in the Quran is 6346, or 19x334. The word "Allah" (God) occurs in the Quran 2698 times, or 19x142.

Foundation of the Structure

The first verse of the Quran is In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Arabic translitera-tion of the verse is "Bism Allah Al-Rahman Al-Raheem." This state-ment is commonly known as the Basmalah.

Table 1. The 19 Arabic letters of the Basmalah with English equivalents
Letter NoArabicEnglish

The Basmalah is so special and unique that it constitutes the foundation upon which the Quran’s 19 based mathematical composition is built. It consists of exactly 19 Ara-bic letters (see Table 1). It is the opening statement in every one of the suras in the Quran, except Sura 9. Since the Quran consists of 114 suras, a missing Basmalah should have resulted in a total of 113 Basmalahs in the Quran, a number which is not a multiple of 19. Yet, there are 114 Basmalahs in the Quran. As it turns out, the missing Basmalah is compensated for in Sura 27, exactly 19 suras later if we start counting from 9. In other words, Sura 27 contains two Bas-malahs, one at the beginning and the other in Verse 30.

Not only is the missing Basmalah found 19 suras later, but also the sura and the verse number in which the extra Basmalah occurs adds up to 57 (27+30), or 19x3. This is just a minute example to demonstrate how the entire Quran is structured like a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces fit together in a 19-based mathematical system.

Four Words of the Basmalah

Each one of the Arabic words that make up the Basmalah occurs in the Quran (excluding the unnum-bered Basmalahs) in multiples of 19. These words are Ism, Allah, Al-Rahman, and Al-Raheem. Their English meanings are NAME, GOD, MOST GRACIOUS, and MOST MERCIFUL, respectively. Note that the root word ISM (name) is used as the first word of the Basmalah, instead of BISM (in the name). Also, the words Rahman and Raheem without the article "Al" (the) are also counted.

Table 2 shows the number of occurrences of the Basmalah’s four words in the Quran.

It is remarkable that not only the numbers of occurrences of the Basmalah’s four words are in mul-tiples of 19, but their multiplication factors by 19 add up to 152, which also is a multiple of 19. There are many other mathematical facts re-garding the mathematical composi-tion of the Basmalah. For more in-formation, please refer to "Beyond Probability: God’s Message in Mathematics Series One: The Opening Statement of The Quran (The Basmalah)."

New Findings

Sister Katerina Kullman from Sweden made the following discovery by God’s will and grace:

Table 2. The four words of Basmalah and their number of occurrences in the Quran
Word No.ArabicEnglishNo. of OccurrenceFactor of 19
1IsmName1919x 1
2AllahGod269819x 142
3Al-RahmanMost Gracious5719x 3
4Al-RaheemMost Merciful11419x 6
Factor Total152 (19x8)

The occurrence of four words of the Basmalah in the entire Quran happens to be in exactly 1919 verses. In order to get this number, look at each (numbered) verse of the Quran, and count the verse as one verse if it contains any of the four words of the Basmalah. For example, Verse 1:1 contains the words of "Allah," "Al-Rahman," and "Al-Raheem", but it is counted only once, not three times. Also, many verses contain multiple oc-currences of these words. They are still counted as one verse. If this procedure is carried out for the entire Quran to see how many verses contain any of the four words of the Basmalah, the result is 1919. In other words, there are 1919 verses in the Quran which contains at least one of the four words of the Basmalah. This is the design of God, the Most Wise. Be He glorified.

These 1919 verses occur in the Quran in 88 different suras. Katerina observed that if she added 1919 to 88, added the result to 786 (the gematrical value of the Basmalah), she got:

1919 + 88 + 786 = 2793 (19x147)

Another observation Katerina made involves the last word of the Basmalah: "Raheem" (Merciful). This word is used in the Quran exclusively as a name of God, and its total count is 114 (19x6), after removing the word "Raheem" of the false verse 9:128, in which "Raheem" refers to the prophet.

When Katerina was working on counting the word Raheem using the index of the words of the Quran, she first found 115 occurrences. Then she realized that one of the occurrences was in 9:128. Guess what. When she added the numbers of suras and verses containing 114 words "Raheem," she found out that their total came up to be 9128. Glory be to God, Creator of all things.

Abdullah Arik