The Basmala, Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim, in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, is the invocation that opens all but one of the 114 chapters of the Quran and that Muslims pronounce before eating, writing, entering, travelling, slaughtering and beginning almost any deliberate act. Whether the phrase counts as a verse of the Quran, and whether it is a verse of each sura it heads, is a genuine and old question on which the schools of law and recitation differ, a rare instance of scholarly disagreement about the text's own boundaries.
The two divine names it invokes both derive from the Arabic root for mercy (r-h-m): al-Rahman, often understood as the all-encompassing mercy that belongs to God alone, and al-Rahim, the mercy shown particularly to His creatures, so that the formula frames every beginning within the divine compassion. As the most frequently written line in the Islamic world it has been a central subject of the calligraphic arts, and its recitation at the threshold of ordinary actions makes it, in practice, the phrase that most continuously threads the remembrance of God through Muslim daily life.