Five Types of Fragments in the Quran

I make my living as an English writer for more than 2 decades but when I first come across the word fragment, I literally had to look it up. Fragments are pieces of text that is more than a word but less than a sentence. 

Let’s go a little bit deeper. If I say ‘This is a screen’ that collection of words in italic is a complete sentence. But if I say, This car, these two words are not a complete sentence but they form a fragment. There are five fragments that you need to know about:

1. Harf Jarr
2. Harf Nasb
3. Idafa
4. As Sifah wal Mousuf
5. Ismul Ishara

Each of these fragments list links to an article explaining it in less than 5 minutes read except Ismul Ishara. I am going to explain Ismul Ishara from what I learn, hopefully make it simpler for you. 

Ismul Isharah refers to pointing words i.e words that point to something. Don’t get overwhelmed and start pulling your hair. This is going to be easy peasy. Pointing words simply means words like this, these, that, and those. 

In Arabic, it is more refined where this and that have different sounds for male and female. This may sound confusing. But in Arabic, every object is either grammatically male or female. So that’s why they have different sounds. 

There are only 3 things that you should know about Ismul Isharah. First, they are all proper nouns that mean the word that they point to is also proper. Secondly, they are non-flexible, which means that their sounds will not change no matter what is their status. Hadza would still sound  Hadza whether it is rafa’, nasb or jarr. 

Thirdly, Ismul Ishara can either be part of a sentence, it can also be part of a fragment. You can easily tell whether an Ismul Isharah is part of a fragment. If an Ismul Ishara i.e is followed immediately by a word that starts with Alif lam then it is a fragment otherwise it is a sentence.