The Holy Quran in numbers

I have always been fascinated by numbers. My job as an analyst verifies that. Growing up as a Muslim child, we have been taught to read the Holy Quran in Arabic. Although we do not understand it completely but we are quite fluent in reading it. The Holy Quran is one voluminous book consisting of more than 600 pages and 114 chapters (also called as Surah). I was intrigued by the way it had been layout - the lines, the verses (also called Aayah), the chapters seemed so random and unequal. Its structure does not resemble any traditional or academic book that we read. However that understanding from my childhood days was debugged later. A few years ago when I started to study Quran in depth and understand the sciences of Quran – I began to realize that there is indeed wisdom behind the structure and layout of Holy Quran. For starters – The Holy Quran is kalamullah meaning it is a word of Allah ﷻ, such that it is been spoken to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. The arrangements of the chapters (Surah) and in it the placement of all the verses (Aayah) are all been designed and told to Prophet Muhammad ﷺ by Allah ﷻ. The students of Quran finds the Holy Quran to be divinely arranged.

According to Late Dr. Israr Ahmed saab there are various pearls of wisdom the student of Quran can extract while studying it. They are as follows:

•        Revolution (and motivation)
•        Coherence (the structures of Surah and Aayah and how they are related to each other)
•        Legals and philosophy
•        Sufism (and its esoteric elements)

Dr. Israar Ahmed saab once said that the great scholars of Quran even though having spent their years and lives in understanding the Holy Book, have only extracted the wisdom from one of its angle. Hence it is important for any student of Quran to delve oneself into the research of various scholars exploring different perspective and picking up of that wisdom.

Having said that, I took a stride to understand the numbers in Quran. I started with counting the numbers of aayah and ruku present in each Surah and tried to visualize that in Tableau (a business intelligence tool). The Tableau tool have been embedded in this post. However, due to its size, it is not completely visible. Hence you could do either of the following to see the full view:

•        Scroll to the right bottom and you will see full screen option. Click on that
•        Click on the following link and this will take you to the Tableau Public page and there you could see the full visualization

The visualization looks better when viewed in laptop/desktop as there you could view the tooltip on hovering over the numbers. Through the tooltip, I have tried to brief on the definition of surah, aayah and ruku. For the word cloud there’s a dropdown provided using which a user can filter for the Surah of their choice and can see the number of ruku and aayah in each Surah and the words mentioned in the Surah (highest number of occurrence of words in Surah have larger size).

Explore different sections and let me know if I could provide/explain anything more.