The Mathematical Structure of the Qur’an

33:30

5 Sep 2014

Mathematics

Mohamed al-Dasani

Mohamed al-Dasani, in this section from a longer lecture, presents information about how the numbers of the surahs (what he calls their sequence number) in the Qurʾān and the number of the verses in each surah and the number of words in each surah may be summed to return to two numbers, which are also the sum of the surah numbers and the sum of the number of verses.

al-Dasani then tries to explain the probability of this occurring to comparisons of a variety of scientific measures, such as the number of seconds since the Big Bang.

The visuals for this video include some problems; the left side of the Powerpoint projection is often illegible.  Both the beginning of the video, where al-Dasani seems to explain where he got the material from, and the end of the lecture have been cut off.

Use the key term “checksum” to find other similar videos.

Evaluation:

There is little discussion of Islam here; most of it is within the bounds of what Muslims have historically understood as acceptable.  Some may quibble with the frequent suggestion that somehow the Qurʾān is from the Prophet Muḥammad (rather than God).

The science — the mathematics here — must be based on the accuracy of the counts of the number of verses etc in the Qurʾān.  That material historically has not always been uniform.  Even the number of words will depend on how one divides verbal units that are often written as orthographic units but are semantically separate. One of the problems with such an analysis is that it is not coming from a prediction, but rather a post-hoc analysis (searching for combinations that are unusual – and then claiming their uniqueness).

There is insufficient historical material on which to base an evaluation.