Orhan Elmaz, Digital Tools and Methods in (+/- Contemporary) Qurʾānic Studies

Orhan Elmaz, Digital Tools and Methods in (+/- Contemporary) Qurʾānic Studies Monday Majlis Online on the 4th of May 2026 Centre for the Study of Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter Bio: Orhan Elmaz is a Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where he teaches multilingual Digital Humanities and classical and modern Arabic language, literature, and culture. His research reflects a dynamic integration of linguistic tradition, digital methods, and cultural analysis. His area lies at the intersection of linguistics, intellectual history, and transcultural studies. He has published on the Qurʾān (and its use and abuse), Arabic and Semitic linguistics, and One Thousand and One Nights. Currently, he is working on the emergence of feminist ideas and their translingual and transregional development, contrasting different Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority communities of the Middle East, Europe, and Central Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Studien zu den koranischen Hapaxlegomena unikaler Wurzeln (Harrassowitz 2011), editor of Endless Inspiration: One Thousand and One Nights in Comparative Perspective (Gorgias 2020) and One Thousand and One Nights (Gale, 2027), and co-editor of Languages of Southern Arabia (Archaeopress, 2014) and New Directions in Digital Modern Languages Research (Liverpool University Press, 2023). https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/modern-l... Abstract: Building on Ibn ʿAṭiyya’s (d. 541 AH/1147 CE) observation that the verb–preposition pairings ʾarsala ʿalā and ʾarsala ʾilā appear in similar contexts in the Qurʾān, I will argue that the two constructions are nonetheless functionally differentiated. I will show that ʾarsala ʿalā occurs predominantly in passages of divine punishment or retribution, whereas ʾarsala ʾilā is associated chiefly with divine communication and prophetic mission. A corpus-based analysis of all attestations of these verb–preposition collocations across the Qurʾān brings into view distributional and discourse-level regularities that are easily overlooked in traditional, manual exegesis. These findings call for a reassessment of variant readings (qirāʾāt), with particular attention to Q 17:68–69, where alternative dotting of the consonantal text (rasm) yields shifts in verbal subject. These findings, in turn, motivate a reassessment of variant readings (qirāʾāt), with particular attention to Q 17:68–69, where alternative dotting of the consonantal text (rasm) produces shifts in verbal subject. The paper thus demonstrates how digital, corpus-linguistic methods can sharpen our understanding of Qurʾānic stylistics while contributing to the evaluation of variant readings within the Qurʾān’s broader oral-written transmission history. In the spirit of the label ‘Majlis’ and also to make the talks even more interesting, our speakers present the topic discussed as embedded in their own journey. You can watch the previous Majlises here    • Monday Majlis series (Centre for the Study...  . However, we don’t record the Q&A in order to keep the discussion free. Please come and enjoy the talks and the discussions : ) If you’d like to be included in the CSI (Centre for the Study of Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter) mailing list, please write to me ([email protected]). We’ll be happy to welcome you! István T Kristó-Nagy https://experts.exeter.ac.uk/4333-ist...