firman / quran-analysis

Replicating intriguing numerical properties of the Qur'an with easy-to-follow, open source procedures

Analysis of the Qur'an

For the benefit of myself and universe at large I have studied a growing number of old 'spiritual' texts.

Among them Lau Zi's Dao De Jing, Sakyamuni's teachings, Hui Neng's Platform suttra and -- as the title of this project insinuates -- the Qur'an.

As non of these texts are originally in English or Dutch I depend on translations, that are as a by-product interpretations as well. While being able to read the original directly would be better, as it removes one filter of interpretation from the message, I do console my self with the fact that the most influential interpretation happens when the reader tries to understand what he reads. I believe words and concepts are relative: they have different meanings depending on the time and the person you ask. I believe he True meaning of spiritual texts is not decyphered by a brain but felt in ones heart. In other words, I believe that the True meaning can not, never ever be fully or enternally captured in words.

Enough background. While studying several Qur'an translations/interpretations I learnt about some intriguing numerical properties of the book. I do not believe these properties change the meaning much or are prerequisite knowledge for anyone studying its message for the purpose of spiritual awakening. Yet to me these properties where intriguing enough start an effort to replicate them.

Currently I know of several types of intriguing numerical properties:

• word counts
• letter counts
• numerical values of words

Often these properies show by dividing resulting numbers by 19. In chapter 74 the 30th verse reads "Over it are nineteen", many see this as a hint that nineteen is of special significance to the book. We can see 1 as the first and 9 as the last number of a decimal system, thereby 1-9 to a decimal system is like alpha-omega to he Greek alphabet. In the New Testament's book of revelation we find several references to this conjunction of alpha and omega.

I do not subscribe to all of the claims people make about numeric analyses of the Qur'an. I do feel some of properties are miraculous, yet I found them often hard to reproduce or ambiguously formulated. My goal for this project is to make it extremely easy to replicate the analyses by anyone with basic programming skills. Besides that I think programming languages -- being extremely formal compared to human laguages -- are particularly suitable to formulate the analyses.

DISCLAIMER

I, Cies Breijs, am working on this project for personal reasons and not as part of any organization. It is simply my effort to replicate claims that intrigue me in a way that whould allow others to replicate them as easy as running a piece of software, and allow the study of their procedures in a formal language.

RESULTS

The results can be found in the html folder in this reposity. The can be seen online here.

INSTALLING AND USING

This software is written 100% in the Ruby prgramming language. The language is open source and free for eny to use, it most important quality is that it often read like English thereby being very to-the-point and programmer friendly.

To use this software you simply [install Ruby](http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads and download this software) (you find the download button in the upper right corner of the "project page":https://github.com/cies/quran-analysis ). You can use either Linux, Mac OSX or Windows -- though Linux and Mac OSX work a lot easier.

In Ruby land we can install libraries with the gem command. Currently we only need one library for the replicate-claims.rb script, it is call RSpec and can be installed with:

    gem install rspec

The gem command should come with most installations of Ruby these days (if not try to install a 1.9+ version of Ruby).

Currently this proejct comes with the following commands:

    replicate_claims.rb
    console.rb
    transform-yuksel.rb
    transform-tanzil.rb

There also exists a Rakefile to generate the html outputs, you can invoke it by executing rake from within the project folder.

The project also ships with to non-executable files, quran.rb and arabic.rb, they are heavily used by the executables.

Good luck intalling and playing with this project.

TODO

• send out requests for code of previous attempts to write software replicating the analyses
• seek help form those who went before me
• add replications for more claims (curretly this project contains proof-of-concepts at best)
• eventually move the code to RSpec for better readability and nice output
• work towards a bunch of classes that can be used from the IRB) console

TODO: TOWARDS A CONSOLE

• a Quran class work be nice, it should be possible to conviently query and search through it.
• queries could return a query object that can then be formatted to needs (w/-or-w/o words/chapter/verse/etc.)
• some extentions to the String class would make our life easier
• maybe a class that colors numbers green if they are a multiple of 19
• a method to romanize arabic: it's so hard to read for me (alternating LtoR/RtoL)
• move all extentions into a core_ext folder (refer to awesome_print)
• make a small introduction to using these scripts in the README

TADA

• wrote a README to elaborate on the intention of my efforts
• simple 'initial' letter count as first found by Khalifa Rashad has been implemented, but results in different counts
• couting for the word 'Allah' has been implemented, resulting in different counts then found in literature
• start a github project, sharing my efforts with a greater audience
• added scripts that transform the original Quran texts (currently only Edip Yuksel's and the cleanest version of the tanzil.net texts are considered)

QUESTIONS

• why do some chapters have a line allocated for the initials and some dont?
• why is the first bismallah not put on 1:0 while the others are
• it seems that revised initial counts on submission.org yield more 19 claims than you made in your book -- why?

LICENSE

Unless mentioned otherwise the license to this souftware is AGPL version 3.

The copy of the Qur'an text you find in this project is from tanzil.net it contains a copyright notice at the end of the file and is released under the Creative Commons No-Derivatives license version 3.0.

The text of this README you are reading is released under the Creative Common Attribution Share-Alike license version 3.0.