It's the Postman I feel sorry for

As you drive/walk/crawl down Stratford Road (Birmingham's Asian thoroughfare) you'd be forgiven for thinking that the council was having a laugh - every other premises appears to be number 786.

Rest assured that this is not an elaborate tax evasion ploy. In days of old, each of the letters of the Arabic alphabet was allocated a numerical value. Words, phrases etc could thus be rendered in numerical form to prevent writer's cramp and facilitate spiritual symbolism. 786 is the numerical representation of the first verse of the qur'an.

The total value of the letters of "Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim" according to one Arabic system of numerology is 786. There are two methods of arranging the letters of the Arabic alphabet. One method is the most common alphabetical order (used for most ordinary purposes), beginning with the letters Alif ا, ba ب, ta ت, tha ث etc. The other method is known as the Abjad numerals' method or ordinal method. In this method the letters are arranged in the following order: Abjad, Hawwaz, Hutti, Kalaman, Sa'fas, Qarshat, Sakhaz, Zazagh; and each letter has an arithmetic value assigned to it from one to one thousand. (This arrangement was done, most probably in the 3rd century of Hijrah during the 'Abbasid period, following the practices of speakers of other Semitic languages such as Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldean etc.)

If you take the numeric values of all the letters of the Basmala, according to the Abjad order, the total will be 786. In the Indian subcontinent the Abjad numerals have become quite popular. Some people, mostly in India and Pakistan, use 786 as a substitute for Bismillah ("In the name of Allah" or "In the name of God"). They write this number to avoid writing the name of Allah, or Qur'anic verses, on ordinary papers.