The Quran
and poetry.
Explore the difference.
Compare the Quran with Arabic poetry through word frequencies and linguistic features. See how their samples separate, or compare poetry from different periods using the same features.
Compare Quran & poetry ↗Explore texts across time.
Stylometry Tool is an interactive research website for comparing Arabic poetry from different historical periods with the Quran. Comparisons use the historical folded spelling of the corpus. Feature frequencies, hierarchical clustering (HC), and principal component analysis (PCA) offer complementary views of the selected texts.
The available poetry groups are Pre-Islamic, Transitional poets (Mukhadramun), Umayyad, Abbasid, Andalusian, Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, Ottoman, and Modern. Choose which eras to include, the number of samples, and the length of each sample. Quran, Pre-Islamic poetry, and Modern poetry are selected by default; you can also compare poetry groups with one another.
The default is 10 samples from each selected group, with 7,000 words per sample, including the Quran. Longer passages and more examples provide a broader basis for estimating feature frequencies and can make recurring patterns clearer. Samples are drawn from non-overlapping passages; groups with less text supply fewer complete samples.
Use the Feature Set dropdown to represent the samples as most frequent words, word bigrams, or character sequences of 1, 2, 3, 5, or 7 characters. Explore their similarities in the Cluster tree and their distribution in the PCA map (principal component analysis). Changing the groups, sampling settings, or feature set automatically updates the results, so you can see how each choice affects the patterns.
The Holy Quran and the challenge to poets — hierarchical clustering
Watch the Arabic explainer, then explore the text comparisons in the experiment lab below.
Quran source: Tanzil Project — Simple Clean 1.1
Compare texts across groups.
Compare Quran with poetry, or select poetry groups to compare across periods.
Reading the corpus…
Explore your texts with HC and PCA.
Choose a method to explore the same samples from a different perspective.
Quran vs poetry: top 100 most frequent words
Features are listed by total frequency across all selected samples. The Top features setting controls the list size (100 by default); constant features are excluded. Rates are per 10,000 feature events, with standardized differences shown alongside.
| Feature | Quran rate | Poetry rate | Standardized difference | Examples |
|---|
Does the result hold across features?
Reuses your last completed experiment’s texts and settings. Differences reveal sensitivity to feature choice.
Methods, provenance & interpretation
Contact
Dr Ahmed Ibrahim Ahmed Omer
University of York, UK
Email ahmed.omer@york.ac.uk aiomer@hotmail.comWe make this tool available to researchers to analyse texts from these historical periods and enrich the field through further scholarly research. If you use it in a research paper, please cite it in the text and include it in your reference list using the format below.
Reference template (APA 7)
Omer, A. I. A. (n.d.). Stylometry Tool: Quran & poetry [Computer software]. [Public URL of the tool]
In-text citation: (Omer, n.d.)
Replace the URL placeholder with the public link to the tool. Use the release year and version number when available; n.d. means no date.