Ar Raheem

The same three letters as the name before it, in a different shape — and the grammarians hear the difference: one form is mercy at its widest, the other mercy as a settled quality, the kind that keeps returning. The two are printed together at the head of the Book and travel together through it; of the 146 ayat carrying this written form, 113 are surah openings.

In Sūrat ash-Shuʿarāʾ it falls ten times, and eight of those are one sentence repeated word for word, closing one prophet’s story after another. A refrain is how a book says a thing that will not go in once. Some truths are not argued into a person; they are set down beside them until they are noticed.