Ha (Pharyngeal) ح

Ha is the sixth letter of the modern Arabic order and the eighth of the older abjad order, from which it takes the numeral value eight. It is the undotted member of the jim, ha and kha group, written as a hook running down into a bowl that falls below the line. It joins on both sides, and reduces in initial and medial position to a small triangular head resting on the line. It is a moon letter, so the lam of the definite article is pronounced before it.

Its sound is a voiceless pharyngeal fricative, produced by narrowing the throat well below where any European language places a consonant. It has no equivalent in English, French or German, and learners are usually taught it by contrast with the plain glottal ha that stands twenty-sixth in the modern order. The two are entirely different letters that happen to be transcribed with the same roman letter, which is why scholarly transliteration marks one of them with a dot beneath.

The name descends from the Northwest Semitic cheth and the letter is the cognate of Hebrew chet, Syriac heth and Samaritan it, whose sense was reconstructed as a fence or an enclosure. That reconstruction belongs to the older linear script rather than to Arabic, and Arabic carries the name without the meaning. Ha stands among the fourteen letters that appear in disjoined form at the head of certain suras of the Quran, where it opens a group of seven suras beginning with ha and mim.

Twenty-nine suras of the Quran open with a short run of letters recited one by one, as letters, rather than read as a word. They are called the huruf muqattaat, the disjoined letters. Fourteen of the twenty-eight letters of the alphabet appear among them, alone or in groups of up to five, and ha is one of the fourteen: it opens the seven suras known collectively by the pair of letters ha and mim.

What they mean has been argued about for as long as there has been Quranic commentary, and the argument has not been resolved. Several positions are held and each has serious defenders. One classical position is that their meaning is known to God alone and that the proper response is to recite them and stop, a view that is itself a position rather than an absence of one. Others have read them as abbreviations of divine names or attributes, or as an oath, or as a challenge that puts the ordinary letters of the Arabic language in front of an audience told that no one can produce the like of the text those letters compose. Later writers in the numerological and mystical registers read them through the abjad values of the letters. Modern historical scholarship has proposed that some at least began as marks made by early collectors or scribes and were then absorbed into the recited text.

The atlas records that the disagreement exists and does not settle it. The camps are genuine, the evidence they draw on is the same body of evidence, and no reading has displaced the others. Facts about the disjoined letters, which letters occur, in which suras, in what groupings, are stable and uncontested; what they signify is not.