Basmala

[Notes 1] It is one of the most important phrases in Islam and frequently recited by Muslims before performing daily activities and religious practices, including prayer.

[2] It is used in over half of the constitutions of countries where Islam is the state religion or more than half of the population follows Islam, usually the first phrase in the preamble, including those of Afghanistan,[3] Bahrain,[4] Bangladesh,[5] Brunei,[6] Egypt,[7] Iran,[8] Iraq,[9] Kuwait,[10] Libya,[11] Maldives,[12] Pakistan,[13] Saudi Arabia,[14] Tunisia,[15] and the United Arab Emirates.

[Notes 2][17] Scholarl debates regarding its inclusion in the in the Qur'anic text reached consensus with the 1924 Cairo Edition, where it was included as the first verse (āyah) of Al-Fatiha and remained an unnumbered line preceding each of the 112 other chapters.

Other common phrases in Islam were also given their own names based on verb form 2 verbal nouns, including Tasbih.

The word basmala was derived from a slightly unusual procedure, in which the first four pronounced consonants of the phrase bismi-llāhi... were used to create a new quadriliteral root:[20] b-s-m-l (ب-س-م-ل).

The Basmala is used extensively in everyday Muslim life, said as the opening of each action in order to receive blessing from God.

Sündermann (2006) reports that a contemporary "spiritual healer" from Syria recommends the recitation of the basmala 786 times over a cup of water, which is then to be ingested as medicine.

[citation needed] In Unicode, the Basmala is encoded as one ligature at code point U+FDFD ﷽ in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block.