Interactive research application

The Rise of Mašriqī and Maġribī Pedagogical Canons of the Qurʾānic Reading Traditions (qirāʾāt), ca. 300–650 AH

Jeremy Farrell · Leiden University

Which Qurʾānic Reading Traditions (qirāʾāt) did Muslims consider “canonical” during the fourth through seventh centuries AH? This study proposes that the answer to this question requires a shift in our understanding of disciplinary development in Islamic scholarship, one that accepts the possibility of the simultaneous development of multiple canons. Using the discipline of the Qurʾānic Reading Traditions (qirāʾāt) as a case study, we show that the simultaneous development of two canons was delimited by geography and sustained through dedicated pedagogical theories and practices in both the Mašriq (the Transjordan, eastern littoral of the Red Sea, and lands eastward) and Maġrib (the Nile Delta and lands westward).

This application is the study’s interactive companion. Every figure in the paper is computed from the corpus it ships with, and the analyses behind those figures can be explored here directly.

Hosted on Posit Connect Cloud — no login required. Alternate link

What is inside

• The paper — the full text, readable in the app alongside the analyses it reports.
• Bayesian analysis — pre-computed multinomial regression posteriors: regional contrasts, temporal trends, and the confound analysis (sub-region, mobility, genre).
• Divergence estimates — model-based and Dirichlet-smoothed Jensen–Shannon divergence between the two regions’ output, by century.
• Scholar mobility — an interactive map of documented travel routes connecting the two regions’ scholarly communities.
• The corpus — a searchable bibliography of the 173 works by 105 authors surveyed in the study, with survival status, Set of Readings, format, and regional coding.

Cite

Farrell, Jeremy. “The Rise of Mašriqī and Maġribī Pedagogical Canons of the Qurʾānic Reading Traditions (qirāʾāt): ca. 300–650 AH.” Journal of the International Qurʾanic Studies Association, forthcoming.

Code and data

The application, its database, and the pre-computed model results are open at github.com/zurstadt/qirat-shiny-app.