This is the opening verse of the Quran. It occurs 114 times in the Quran and appears at the beginning of 113 Suras of the Quran. In every manuscript of the Quran since its initial revelation to the prophet it has been written with exactly 19 letters.
Here is one of the oldest manuscripts from the University of Birmingham which is carbon-dated to potentially during the prophet’s own life.
If we split the letters of the Bismillah we can more clearly see this.
The interesting thing is that fact that Bismillah contains exactly 19 letters was never a point of contention until the discovery of the mathematical miracle of the Quran and its common denominator of the number 19. After its discovery, many individuals came out of the woodworks to attempt to discredit this miraculous finding. One vector of attack that individuals attempted is to claim that the Bismillah did not contain 19 letters despite what anyone with eyes can see for themselves.
A simple proof that the number of letters of Bismillah was not disputed until the mathematical miracle of the Quran is that for generations individuals would use to write 786 as an alternative to writing the actual text of Bismillah. The reason they did this is because in Arabic every letter represents a sound, but also a number, similar to Roman numerals. The number assigned to each letter is its “Gematrical Value.” The numerical values of the Arabic alphabet are shown below.
Here is how the gematrical value of Bismillah results in a total of 786.
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