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﴿ فَاسْأَلُوا أَهْلَ الذِّكْرِ إِن كُنتُمْ لَا تَعْلَمُونَ ﴾

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The weakness of the claim that the letters at the beginnings of surahs are similar to inflected words in the Qur'an

Machine translationRead the Arabic original
The questioner : He says: Honorable Shaykh, we know that the Qur'an came with words in its speech that the Arabs did not know before, such as His saying, the Exalted:
That, then, is an unjust division.تِلْكَ إِذًا قِسْمَةٌ ضِيزَىٰ
[An-Najm 53:22]
, meaning they said that the Arabs knew them before due to the difference between the *dād* and the *zāy*,

The Shaykh : What did they say?

The questioner : They said, to clarify that the division is unjust, He used the *dād* and the *zāy* to differentiate the points of articulation, so this one is difficult to pronounce and this one is easier to pronounce.

The Shaykh : Difficult?

The questioner : I have decided it is so, Honorable Shaykh.

The Shaykh : No, no, absolutely not. All the inflected words, if they are originally from the speech of the Arabs, it is clear; otherwise, they are inflected like *sands* (silk) and *tabraq* (shining) and their like.

The questioner : But if we say only at the beginning of the surah with these letters, it shows that the language is from them and they were unable to handle it. Is it not the case that if it were in another style with eloquence, it would achieve the same purpose, and the Qur'an has come with that in other ways?

The Shaykh : There is no difference between the alphabetic letter that is not constructed in an inflected structure and the inflected word, for there is a great difference, because these neglected alphabetic letters are used to construct speech, but the strange word that the Arabs do not know except a little, or a word that occurred in their speech standing on its own, there is a difference between them.
Source قناة «فضيلة الشيخ محمد بن صالح العثيمين»، [619] ضعف القول بأن الحروف في أوائل السور شبيه بالكلمات المعربة في القرآن - ابن عثيمين — youtube.com

The Arabic text is a machine transcription of the audio recording.

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