Stylometric Comparison between the Quran and Hadith based on Successive Function Words: Could the Quran be written by the Prophet?

Abstract

Usually, when one writes a text document, several function words are put within that text to make a logical link between words and to give more explanation to the major idea of the paragraph. However, it is not very common to see two Successive Function Words (SFW) put together in a sentence, even if it is not really incorrect. For instance, instead of writing “I left my room after our discussion”, one can say in Arabic: “I left my room from-after our discussion”, which is correct in this language. In this work, those successive function words are investigated in the Quran, Hadith and five other Arabic religious books, in order to see whether the corresponding styles are similar (i.e. Stylometric comparison between the different books). Results of this investigation show that the use of SFW is very discriminative between the Quran and Hadith, which implies that the Quran and Hadith come from two different Authors. Moreover, the discrimination is even noticeable between the Quran and several other books investigated in this work. This result suggests that the Quran Author style is beyond the traditional human religious styles that are usually employed in the Arabic literature (ancient or contemporary). Hence, the only explanation we have is: The Quran should probably come from God (Allah).