Quran glossary · accepted

الحروف المقطعة

letter-elements taught through the pen

They are not “mysterious letters”. They are letter-elements from the written/recited system God taught humanity. They are the very building-blocks of revelation, writing, reading, teaching, and human knowing. Here is what God says in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas 6:10 relating from Jesus: "Listen, teacher, and understand the arrangement of the first letter-element. Pay attention to how it has sharp strokes and a middle mark: strokes which you see being pointed, crossing through, brought together, going outward, drawn away, raised up, dancing, radiating, three-marked, double-ended, same-shaped, same-thick, same-kind, measuring-cord-bearing, balance-set, equal-measured, equal-parted. The alpha has these strokes." So Jesus is not treating alpha as a mysterious sound with no teachable content. He is treating it as a structured element with τάξις / taxis — order, arrangement, sequence. κανόνες / kanones are literally rules, rods, straight lines, standards. This is strongly connected to ٱلَّذِى عَلَّمَ بِٱلْقَلَمِ عَلَّمَ ٱلْإِنسَٰنَ مَا لَمْ يَعْلَمْ The Qur’anic Arabic Corpus marks ʿallama in 96:4 as “taught” and bil-qalam as “by the pen,” then 96:5 again has ʿallama al-insān mā lam yaʿlam — “taught the human what he did not know.”