Nineteen

In this article I present the story of Dr Rashad Khalifa, a US-based Egyptian scientist who claimed to have scientifically shown how the text of the Quran was the immutable speech of God. He did this by means of computer-based calculations that showed how the number 19 was embedded in the formal structure of the Quran, thereby indicating a superhuman level of coding. I locate such efforts at the conjuncture of the long history of textual polemics that aim at undermining religious traditions by exposing errors within authoritative texts, the history of magical squares within Islamic sciences, and the more recent history of the subfield of Islam and science that attempts to study the Quran to show how it forecast scientific discoveries. I suggest that Dr Khalifa was attempting to definitively address the aspect of doubt that accompanies written texts, for which he elicited mixed reactions from a wide audience of Muslims. In this instance, tracking the fate of a number through a man’s life suggests how some doubts may not be addressable within the rubric of scientific facts.