The following is a guest post by Br. Sharif Randhawa, co-author of the illuminating book, “Divine Speech” which was written alongside Ustadh Nouman Ali Khan. Br. Sharif also runs a wonderfully informative blog called Quranic Musings which I highly recommend!

I was sent the following video clips in which an individual named Anthony Rogers claims that that Quran 112:1 (qul huwa ’llāhu aḥadun) contains a grammatical error, and that, moreover, Muslims mis-recite the verse in order to avoid the error:

Both of the above claims are patently false, as anyone with knowledge of even the most basic rules of Arabic grammar will recognize. It is deeply presumptuous of someone who shows ignorance of such basic rules of Arabic grammar to claim to have a better grasp of it than the premier work of Arabic literature, the Quran, and the entire Muslim tradition of Arabic grammar, not to mention of Quranic exegesis and recitation. In any case, the errors in both of these claims are as follows:

Contention 1: Rogers claims that the wording in the Quran of qul huwa ’llāhu aḥadun (“Say: He is Allah, one,” or alternatively “Say: He, Allah, is one”) is grammatically incorrect, because aḥadun means not “one” but “one of”; the text, according to him, should actually say qul huwa ’llāhu aḥadu.

Answer: Rogers’ claim is exactly the opposite of what Arabic grammar entails. In a genitive construct, which is the form that expresses the grammatical formula “X of Y,” the X (or muḍāf) that is followed by the genitive Y (or muḍāf ‘ilayhi) precisely cannot carry tanwīn (the indefinite -n ending). This is literally one of the first rules of a genitive construct in Arabic (see the excerpt from p. 44 from Alan Jones’ Arabic Through the Qur’ān, below).


Contention 2: Rogers then claims that Muslims mis-recite the verse to avoid this alleged error, as Muslims most frequently recite the verse as qul huwa ’llāhu aḥad, without the inflected -(u)n ending.

Answer: The claim that this is a mispronunciation is, again, false according to the most basic conventions of Arabic. This is because in Arabic speech, when one pauses at the end of a sentence that terminates with a short vowel ending, he or she normally drops the short vowel ending, including the tanwīn if there is one. Any Arabic speaker can confirm that for you.