Question

Alhamdulillah for your site and shokran and may Allah reward you for your help with our tajweed questions!  In listening to a recitation of the Qur'an it is noticeable that a certain word (altaqataa) in surah Aali 'Imraan in ayah 13 that is normally pronounced with a ta' with a shaddah on it (due to the assimilation of the lam before it) is not pronounced this way!  In fact when I looked at the Qur’an I saw that the ta’ in fact does not have a shaddah; could you please explain the reason for this.

Answer

May Allah reward you for your questions and make our intentions solely for Allah in all our deeds. 

Masha’ Allah this is an excellent question.  When there is a  of the definite article “the” entering a noun starting with the letter , the  merges into the  and the  acquires a shaddah as a result of the merging.  This  would then be  shamsiyyah. 

In the word you are asking about:  , the word is not a noun, but a verb.  The  saakinah is part of the verb, and not the same  saakinah of the definite article “the” that enters only nouns.  In this case then, if we were to start on this word, the hamzah wasl would not be read with a fat-h, which it does when started nouns; instead the rule for hamzah wasl in verbs would be applied.  We would then look at the third letter of the verb (the hamzah wasl is counted as the first letter) and if the third letter has a fat-h or a kasrah, we should start the hamzah wasl with a kasrah.  We therefore start this word with a kasrah on the hamzah al-wasl, since the third letter of the verb has a fat-h.
If we are reading in continuum with the words before this;

The hamzah wasl is then dropped in pronunciation and we would recite the last letter of the word (a  with a kasrah) before the verb starting with a hamzah wasl,  then go directly to the  saakinah, the first pronounced letter now in   .