LEXICAL PARSING OF THE TEN QIRA`ĀT-AṢḤAB AṢ-ṢILAH

Abstract

Qur`ān being the word of our Creator, has been revealed in Seven Aḥruf and got preserved in the authentic Ten Qira`āt. One of the groupings among the Ten Qurrā` is termed Aṣḥāb aṣ-Ṣilah, which includes two of the Qira`āt (`Ibn Kathīr al-Makkī and `Abū Ja'far al-Madnī) and a Riwāyah of Qālūn ‘an Nāfi’ al-Madnī. They have specific fundamental rules associated with them, which we will explore in this research paper as their main features. Notably, the main common factor that unites them and from where their name got derived is the Ṣilah of Mīm al-Jam’ (prolonging the plural mīm). Algorithms are developed to identify the main features of these companions on each word of the Qur`ān, and then an automated conversion of the words is carried out based on those rules. Eventually, this results in insights into these features and quantification of such words in an automated way which provides an efficient and reliable approach, covering thousands of occurrences and repetitions for each respective Riwāyah. Each word of the Qur`ān (77K) is then tagged with these features, and these converted words are ultimately made part of the corpora being developed for these Ten Qira`āt.