Presenting a Computing Method for Finding the Central Verse of Quranic Surahs

Abstract

In recent years, many efforts have been made to present the structure of surahs in Quran and consequently to present interpretative content from these structures. Despite the considerable improvements in this field and spread of novel knowledge from the appearance of Quranic verses, there is still no clear and firm method for finding structure of different surahs and the selection of different structures by scientists is in most cases carried out based on their personal knowledge. The present study deals with the introduction of a computing model to find the central verse of Quranic surahs. In this method, the amount of similarity of Quranic verses is defined through quantification of the similarity between Quranic roots. Based on the results, verses' similarity graph is modeled. Then, a tree structure is gained for the surah by finding the maximum spanning tree of the similarity network. Finally, the central verse is detected using different centrality measures. For studying the benefits and limitations of our method, it is applied to the surah Ya-Seen particularly and the tree structure of this surah's verses is modeled. Based on applying betweenness and closeness to the tree structure, the central verse of this surah is obtained. Accordingly, some interpretational contents are presented with regard to the meaning of the central verse which are innovatively clear and coherent.