Maysum

This author has written 11 articles

Your Efforts Matter!

(I wrote this poem as part of a class assignment back in 2022. The topic was how the knowledge itself that “God judges us based on our efforts” can result in many different kinds of effects. I liked the poem so I decided to post it here.)

The scholar stood up for his speech
And gazed at those he’d come to teach.
From every walk of life they came,
But the words they’d hear would be the same.
How could one message cater all,
The rich, the poor, the big, the small?
He paused, and chose his words with care, 
Addressing those assembled there.
Would he, when preaching their belief,
Be long and flowy, or keep it brief?
Judiciously, he chose the latter,
And spoke three words:

Read More→

Juzz’ Word Clouds

A few years ago, I thought it would be interesting to take all of the words in (the English translation of) each Juzz’ of the Qur’ān and see what they would look like as word clouds. The result would be 30 images, each of which captures the most repeated terms in the corresponding section of the Qur’ān. It would be an easy way to see, at a glance, what each Juzz’ is talking about.

Read More→

Exceptional Situations

Sometimes, you think you really have reached an understanding of how things work. You get it. The rules have started to make sense.

And then you realize that no, actually, things don’t work the way you think they do, and everything you once believed is now under question. 

This might happen in a lot of different contexts, but it can happen extremely often when studying the Arabic language, which is notorious for having exceptions upon exceptions. Now, usually, it’s very clear that a given rule has a lot of exceptions, and that it should be treated more like a general guideline than an actual law. However, there are some cases where something really looks like it might be an absolute rule that you can put your trust in… until you realize it’s not.

Here are some exceptional cases for what might have appeared to be exceptionless rules…

Read More→

Qur’anic Verses for Stuffy Noses

No, I’m not talking about verses of the Qur’ān that can be used to treat nasal congestion. I’m interested in finding out which verses can be pronounced correctly even when the reciter has a stuffy nose.

There is a property called ghunna that applies to some of the letters in the Qur’ān. Basically, in order to recite a letter with ghunna, the nose has to play a role in the pronunciation; the mouth and throat are not enough to generate the correct sound. There are some verses in the Qur’ān that contain no instances of ghunna. For example, the first verse of Sūrah 113: al-Falaq (if recited correctly) will sound the same whether you pinch your nose or not – try it!

قُلْ أَعُوذُ بِرَبِّ ٱلْفَلَقِ

My question is: how many verses are there in the Qur’ān that have this property?

Read More→

The Cosmological Argument Using Math

The cosmological argument to prove the existence of God has been my favourite proof of its kind since the first time it was presented to me. It was simple enough to understand, it felt rigorous enough to be convincing, and it left a lot of room open to extract implications and corollaries that were interesting and useful.

Still, the fact that the argument was presented in natural language, rather than the language of symbolic logic, always left me with an unsettled feeling: shouldn’t this proof, like all others that are watertight and irrefutable, be possible to express in mathematical terms? I made some shallow attempts to codify it myself, but I never managed to do it in a way that left me satisfied.

Read More→

The Voice of Prayer

I was looking up a ruling regarding the volume of voice involved during the recitation of surahs during prayer and ended up reading all of the relevant rulings from Sayyid Sistani on the topic in both the English and Persian versions of Islamic Laws (Tawḍīh al-Masā’il). I found them quite fascinating and decided to summarize a few of the main rulings in the following fictional story.

Disclaimer: This is not meant to be a definitive discussion on Islamic rulings. Although an attempt has been made to reference every ruling mentioned in the story, every duty-bearing Muslim should consult with the rulings of their own marja’ directly.

Ali finished his Maghrib prayer and turned to face his friend, Kumayl, who was sitting next to him. Kumayl was just finishing his prayer as well.

“Well, Kumayl!” said Ali. “I don’t know whether you just finished your Maghrib prayer or a nāfilah prayer.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Kumayl.

Read More→

Palindromes in the Qur’an

How many palindromes are in the Qur’an? It depends on how you define a palindrome.

In English, a palindrome is a word or sequence or words that reads the same backwards and forwards. However, the concept gets a bit more complicated in Arabic. For one thing, Arabic has diacritic marks to take into account; do those have to match up too? On top of that, it’s also not always clear where one word ends and the next one starts – there are all kinds of attached pronouns and prepositions and other things that make word boundaries a little ambiguous.

I decided on a few constraints on what I would consider a palindrome:

Read More→

Qur’anic Verb Breakdown

When studying Qur’anic Arabic, a lot of time is spent learning the different forms and cases that verbs can take, and how to conjugate the verbs across all 14 possible Arabic pronouns. A lot of effort can go into memorizing all of these various combinations, although in reality, just a handful of situations make up the vast majority of verb occurrences that actually appear in the Qur’an.

This raises the question: Which verb cases, forms, and conjugations are the most frequently occurring in the Qur’an, and by how much?

Read More→

Repeated Phrases in Verses

There is an interesting anecdote about a person who claimed to have memorized the entire Qur’an. In order to validate his claim, a panel of judges selected random excerpts from the holy book and asked him to identify, from memory, which verses the excerpts came from. As a particularly tricky challenge, one judge brought forth the following quote:

فِيهِ فِيهِ

How unusual! There are no nouns or verbs at all here (the phrase literally translates to “in it in it”) so there are no contextual clues to help out with the identification.

Read More→