Year Paper – Religion Studies, Honours

The Meccan Shorter Surahs: extracting the theme and topics using a digital humanities approach

Name: JaffarAssima Chiosa

Date required: December 2 2018
Date submitted:
Number of Words:
Student No.: 201171973
e-Mail address: jchiosa@cybersmart.co.za

Disclaimer:
1. I have read, understood and followed all the rules and guidelines contained in the “Guidelines for
Writing Term Papers and Research Essays” while writing this assignment. After completing the
assignment I read through the guidelines again to double check that I conformed to all of them

2. I understand fully what plagiarism is and declare that a) all the work contained in this essay is mine
and b) wherever I have borrowed the words and ideas of anyone that I have cited them and, where
needed, placed them in inverted commas with my sources clearly stated in a manner that enables
the reader to conveniently track all the sources and specific quotes and to see a clear distinction
between my words and those of my sources.

3. I understand

a) that this is an academic paper wherein it is not proper to argue as I would in a religious setting,
b) that I have not tried to defend my faith or any beliefs that I may be holding and
c) that this is an objective academic exercise-in as far as it is possible- to be read only
by the examiner and the external examiner and anybody else involved in the grading process.
It has been a long journey - recording the Qur'an on tree leaves, papyrus, etc. in the sixth century to
the 21st century digital mode of storage in digital form (flash drives, computers, etc.). The mode of
interpreting and analysing the Qur'an has also revolved from traditional modes of teacher/student
relationship. Khalifa has used a mathematical approach to understand the importance of the number
19 as being central in the interpretation of the Qur'an.

This paper uses various available digital tools in order to understand the themes covered in the
shorter Meccan Surahs. Various online platform like Corpus Qur'an, the Python project and online
search resources are used to analyse the themes in these Surahs.

Introduction

The Juz Amma (last chapter of the Qur’an) comprises of the shorter surahs (chapters). It is, most often, used
as an introductory piece in Qur’anic schools for the study of Qur’anic sciences and its memorization. This
paper attempts to read the Qur’an and derive its meanings through digital lenses. The paper uses digital
humanities tools and techniques to achieve its objectives. The results derived from that exercise are then
fused with standard textual analysis tools to unearth the richness and reveal hidden meanings of this part of
the Qur’an. The paper views the Juz Amma as literature (albeit divine) and continues on that basis.

Introduction
Meneses and Futura (2018) defines the field of Digital Humanities as ‘...combines procedural methodologies
for the sciences with the reflection that is carried out in the Humanities.’ (Menesis and Futura 2018:). While
many works have been carried out in digitising Islamic sources and the Quir’an, the field of Islamic Digital
humanities is a relatively new field. Muhanna (2016) suggests that the year 2016 is the year that this field
has gained much traction.

In the field of humanities, narrative criticism, self-referentiality, intra-textuality and inter-textuality are some of
the accepted methodologies to reading text. These methodologies, among others, make use of weight,
frequency and volume of the text in order to derive and give meaning to the text. El-Awa (2006) bases her
whole text on the textual relations of the Qur’an in order to derive meaning to the texts. She states,

‘The study looks at textual relations, their meanings, the linguistic devices used to indicate them, the division of the text and
the information structures that are determined by those relations, the way they are recovered by recepients of the Qur’an
and finally the role they play in conveying the overall meaning of the text... this study, might yield very interestring results
and offer answers to the holistic question: Do Qur’anic surahs possess coherence, or organic unity and is this necessary at

all as a quality of the text or is it not?’ (El-Awa 2006:2).

As if to borrow from El-Awa (2006) above, this paper notes the centrality of text in providing meaning in the
humanities and linguistic fields. As such, the methodology for this paper has adopted the following
methodology to conduct its research:
 1. A custom-made computer programme by the writer is used to aggregate all the words used in Juz
Amma1 – the programme segregates between the Arabic and English translations of the Qur’an;
2. The programme makes use of the widely available database of the Qur’an in Arabic;
3. Three other databases consisting of various translations of the Qur’an have also been obtained and
used separately. This is done so as to show the end-result by using the translation of the Qur’an, i.e.
use of the English translation only to analyse the Qur’an may give a different result;
4. The common words (a, for, the, etc.) are removed from the overall analysis of this exercise;
5. An xml weighting and chart is used to indicate the top 20 themes being covered by Juz Amma.

The primary question the paper attempts to answer is: What are the top twenty themes covered by the Juz
Amma – when analysed using digital tools? The secondary and alternate questions that would be answered
are: Does the conclusion arrived in the main question remain the same when we only consider the
translatioons of the Qur’an2?

The write-up for this paper has been divided into four parts. In the first part, the field of digital humanities is
introduced. Second part discusses the intersection of Islam, the digital world and digital humanities – a few
analysis and approaches to interpreting Qur’anic text are also discussed in this section. In the third part, the
research is conducted and results are presented. In the last part (four), conclusions are presented and
pointers for further study are discussed.

Bibliography and notes:

1. Meneses, Luis and Furuta, Richard. 2018 An Introduction to Digital Humanities. In The 18th
ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, June 3-7 2018. Forthworks: Texas
2. El-Awa, Salwa. 2006. Textual Relations in the Qur’an: relevance, coherence and structure. New
York: Routledge
3.
4. Shmits, P, Pearce, L and Donbrowski. A collaboration between computer scientists and humanist
scholars. Digitalhumanitiers.org
5. Burdick Anne, Drucker Johanna, Lunenfeld Peter, Presner Todd, Schnapp Jeffrey. 2012. Digital
Humanities. Mountain View: MIT Press
6. Powell, M A 1990. What is Narrative Criticism? Minneapolis: Ausberg Fortress
7. Peralta, J H and Verkinderen, P, 2016. “Find for Me!”: Building a Context-Based Search Tool Using
Python. In The Digital Humanities and Islamic and Middle East Studies.(Muhanna ed.)

1 . Using an expected methodology in humanities, where a research topic/question is repeatedly revisited in order to
refine the research area, this may change during the course of the study. Writer has seen some of the readily
available digital tools (search engines) that may be used in order to get similar result. However, these tools may
need refining for the purposes of this research.
2 . Three different versions of the Qur’an (randomly selected) are used in this paper.
8. Muhanna, Elias (ed). 2016. The Digital Humanities and Islamic and Middle East Studies.
9. 500 Influential Muslims. Mufti Ebrahim Desai and his ask-imam.com
10. Mufti Barkatullaah, Islamic Computing, London
11. Conjectual Criticism: computing past and future text. academic.oup.com