In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, The Most Merciful

Salamu 'Alaykum (Peace be upon you)!

All praise be to the Lord Most High, who sent us miraculous signs during 2024 - the year of the signs - and who blessed us greatly with evidence affirming the preservation and truthfulness of the Quran in its declaration of being from God.

I want to briefly share some thoughts about signs, what defines a sign, and how we determine whether something is a sign from God, a miracle. Then we will move on to discuss the so-called “19 miracle code” and why it is anything but a miracle or a sign.

• A sign or miracle (i.e., ayah) can be defined as follows: Something that deviates from natural or scientific laws, nor can it be achieved or produced by humans or jinn, and is therefore attributed to a divine agency, namely God.

For something to qualify as a sign, it must be impossible for humans or jinn to replicate. Otherwise, how could it be considered a sign if, tomorrow, some random Joe Schmoe produces an equally impressive, albeit fake, Quran? Or if everyone could somehow with time and effort develop the ability to cure blindness, and so on? Signs are sent by God to prove to them that it indeed is God who is behind a caller or a message, and to effectively do so, this sign must be impossible to produce by anyone else.

Now, regarding this so-called “19 code”:

Even if this code were present in the Quran, it would still not be considered a sign or a miracle, because humans can also write books full of codes, puzzles, wordplay, and numerical phenomena. All one has to do is keep a separate record of the specific counts of the words or letters included in the “code,” work within the limitations one has set, or simply add another 19 words or letters of a given count, and it will once again be divisible by 19 and thus a “sign” (sarcasm).

And if a count fails when analyzing the Quran, one can simply introduce Gematria (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with Islam) as Rashad Khalifa often did, and voilà, the total once again becomes divisible by 19. Do you understand what I am trying to convey here, and how this supposed “code” cannot be considered a sign or a miracle? If certain words yield totals divisible by 19, but other similar words or names of God do not, then that represents a discrepancy in the alleged system. Why would the phrase “Allah” conform to this pattern while “ar-Rahman” does not? This is precisely where words have been selectively chosen without a consistent basis and then presented as evidence of a “code.”

Another point to note is that for something to be considered a sign, it cannot be altered in any way. Otherwise, one could remove half of the Quran and claim it was fabricated, while asserting that the remaining half satisfies the conditions of some arbitrary code. Rashad Khalifa and the Submitters are known for such distortions. They've not only removed verses, but also added letters because one of the disjointed letters did not conform to some baseless count they imagined. One cannot have it both ways - the patterns must either be inherently present or not at all; otherwise, the entire theory collapses. You created your own "miracle pattern" and claim it to be a sign from God.

If a “code” requires removing verses to work, then the code is being used to override the text, not confirm it, and the very text has to alter itself to appear consistent and agree with a baseless claim. This is not how signs work.

The same can be done with any other book that contains verses. One could even apply this to different numbers and construct elaborate patterns - people have identified patterns based on the number seven as well; are they now also messengers of God? If ordinary individuals can replicate a supposed sign, it ceases to be a sign or a miracle. This principle is quite simple to grasp, and once one takes the time to internalize it, one may come to the conclusion that Rashad Khalifa was merely a fabricator and a liar. Had he been truthful and a genuine messenger of God, he would have been given something that others cannot emulate, such as a fulfilled prophecy within a code or pattern that clearly demonstrates deliberate divine design. Rashad did not present a sign; rather, he offered his own unsupported predictions of a Doomsday year, which he derived from arbitrary counts within the Quran.

With this, I end this post.

/ By Exion