Question

In ayah 57 of surah Yusuf:   the first two words begin with a hamzah after the alif and lam that means "the" - but they are placed differently on the alif - Should I read these differently?  Thank you and may Allah reward you.

Answer

And may Allah reward you and all the Muslims with great goodness.

The first word of this aayah , the letter  has a fat-h on it.  The alif (hamzah wasl actually) and lam meaning “the” that is added before nouns, always has a saakinah.  Since this  has a vowel, we know then it is not the definite article.  There is instead, a  with a fat-h followed by a hamzah also with a fat-h, and this hamzah is “sitting” on an alif.  This first letters of this word would be read as a  and its accompanying fat-h, and next a hamzah with its accompanying fat-h, then the reader would proceed to the next letter of the first word, a  saakinah.

The second word of this aayah  does have the hamzah wasl followed by the  saakinah of the definite article “the”.  The next letter after the  saakinah is a hamzah with an accompanying fat-h, but this time the hamzah is not “sitting” on any letter, but just there between the  saakinah and the next letter after the hamzah, which is an alif.  When you look at this combination, you see a laam-alif , but in the middle of this, the hamzah with a fat-h is written.  We now know that we have two letters after the saakinah of the definite article, a hamzah with a fat-h, followed by an alif.  You may remember from the tidbit lessons that whenever there is a hamzah followed by a medd letter, there is a lengthening called .  This medd, or lengthening, is lengthened two vowel counts the way we read.  In other words, after we say the fat-h on the hamzah we continue lengthening that fat-h until it reaches two vowel counts. 

Insha’ Allah this helps.