Exploring Mathematical Miracles in the Quran: A Measured Perspective

hello everyone and welcome to blogging Theology and today I'm delighted to talk to amine Lon you're most welcome sir

Salam alaykum wum Salam thank you for having me fall absolute pleasure uh to have you here today and Aman is a fourth

year PhD student at UCL otherwise known as University College London which is consistently ranked as one of the top 10

universities in the world he's studying AI enabled Health Care specifically focusing on applying AI methods in the

context of brain cancer to help develop more personalized treatment for patients his Masters was in data science and

machine learning also at UCL where he learned quantitive programming methods to examine data his Bachelors was in

computer science at the University of Bristol now he's interested in the miraculous nature of the Quran from a

variety of perspectives including but not limited to its remarkable mathematically precise patterns but he's

interested in this in a much more nuanced and measured way some claims have gone arguably over the top and

potentially discredited the whole idea of remarkable mathematical phenomena in the Quran so Amin today is going to

address this uh with a presentation so over to you sir thanks so much Paul and uh thanks for inviting me I feel yeah

quite humble to be on here um so you've given a really great introduction I think that kind of encapsulates my own

introduction quite well but as as I've shown in the title here um I'm going to be introducing the idea of mathematical

miracles in the Quran um and I've added here a measured approach which the pun wasn't intended but the idea was to make

sure that we're not overreaching uh in this field so just as a disclaimer um I haven't like discovered any like um

significant mathematical miracles in the Quran itself but what I've done in this presentation today and I hope to

communicate is that everything I show is something that I recapitulated myself um using my own programming skills Excel

skills um and in some segments I even show proof of that so the idea is to restore a sense of transparency and

Trust in this um study of the Quran so that kind of leads into the this introductory slide so why should we look

at the Quran from a mathematical perspective at all um well the study of the beauty of the Quran is quite

multifaceted and it's got many remarkable aspects to it countless remarkable aspects to it in a myriad of

domains so Linguistics history biology astronomy human psychology uh and more um people from different expertises will

find something uniquely remarkable to them in the Quran um so I say why not mathematics um you know the Quran is the

word of God we believe that as Muslims and this is the same God who invented mathematics and uh imbued into our

everyday surroundings into nature into the fabric of reality itself um so I don't think it's odd to

want to examine whether any such signature exists in the Quran and um moreover the Quran itself mentions

explicitly certain numbers and mathematical Concepts as well that may be an illusion to it inviting some

exploration from that perspective yeah um and also there are all these miracles in the Quran and each will cater to a

different type of person and you know to people like myself the mathematical ones may be especially interesting maybe less

so to other people but I just think it's good to cover all bases now as I was researching this because

this was just a hobby of mine but as I was researching it I found out that there is some surprising cont

controversy around this uh way of examining the Quran and um first and foremost just to put some of these

caveats forward uh the Quran is not a book of mathematics it's not a book of science it's not a book of History it's

not a book of linguistics first and foremost the primary purpose of the Quran is uh a book of purpose a book of

divine instruction for Humanity and it outlines the goal of what it means to be human why we are alive um I.E to worship

God uh follow his guidelines through his Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and to enter Paradise in the life after

death after Resurrection um and avoid punishment so this study is merely to appreciate one of the many remarkable

aspects of the quran's beauty um as I alluded to earlier and to further attest to its inhuman origin so the study of

the miraculous nature of the Quran is not new I believe it's called Quran but um I'm just re hopefully reigniting um

this perspective on the Quran uh itself but uh that being said there are some big caveats we need to avoid because

there have been some pitfalls that you know previous people who've sort of obsessed over um the Quran from a

mathematical angle have fallen into and we we don't want to do that so for instance numerology we don't want to um

look into numerology at all in the Quran seeing it from that perspective I mean from some aspect it's uh it's even

associating partners with God to assume that there's some numbers that are inherently able to grant us powers or

you know magical numbers and the occults and things like yeah yeah especially the

occult which you know they really believe in like um sacred geometry to to an unhealthy extent we we don't want to

go there we want to just have this as an appreciation of the Quran but not something to you know um extrapolate

these these uh perhaps occultic practices into um similarly we don't want to force mathematical patterns onto

the Quran and I bring an example of this because as you alluded to at the at the very uh introduction Paul

um one of the things that's plagued this study of the Quran that's been done before from a mathematical perspective

is that people have reached too far into trying to link some supposed mathematical Miracle with the Quran and

some of those reaches are you know just quite far out that someone who encounters the mathematical study of the

Quran and that's the first thing they see the first like Miracle they see in this perspective um they will just be

dismissive of the entire study and that was me for me too because there's some

Notorious cases out there uh of people who made extraordinary claims which weren't really grounded in fact at all

and uh that you know and it helps to discredit the whole whole idea but the point of this presentation is to have a

much more sober measured as you call it presentation based on your expertise uh in mathematics and data analysis and so

on which you do as a PhD student and you you You' still been able to produce some remarkable phenomena and and that's why

it's such a a great exercise what you're doing I think yeah yeah just to clarify I've been able to reproduce things that

people have said so I don't I don't want to take credit for anything here but I do want to show as you've said that this

stuff is real so what I'll present today actually exists you don't have to um yeah um basically it's it's it's

actually there I'm not lying and I've even like put some of the proof for that so hopefully to restore a sense of

credit ability to the field as a whole because I think it's it's a real shame to dismiss the entirety of it because

there are some really like remarkable gems in the Quran from a mathematical perspective as I hope to show just a

couple examples today in um so just yeah just to finish off so yeah we don't want to change the Quran to fit a

mathematical model so this is something done this but people actually said oh these two verses are not quite right if

you change them this way then this mathematical miracle that I'm exist and this is course absolutely

outrageous you can't change the Quran yeah yeah and I think even that is in a way it's counterintuitive because one of

the Miracles we believe as Muslims is that the Quran is preserved yeah exactly and so you're sort of like cutting off

one miracle in order to enforce uh another one which is arguably much less real um so really you're not even

gaining anything by doing that I think it's uh yeah it's not it's not good um and just generally reaching too far

so to give an example of I want to give a concrete example of this maybe a bit of a light-hearted note to ease into

things but there's this case study I want to give on overreaching a mathematical

Miracle um the Quran and the moon landing and uh this is an actual example I happen to find and um it's from a

website um by like I think a well-meaning well-intentioned uh Muslim um blog post um and the rest of this

blog is actually I think like has some useful da materials it seems like a well-intentioned Muslim who wants to um

show like the remarkable nature of the Quran and but I think this particular um post that they had written which I just

you know searched on Google like Quan and moonlanding is this real um I found this and I think it's an example not

only to show that people are overreaching but to show that potentially well-intentioned people

without any intention of um discrediting the Quran or making this dismissing the study are going forth and like making

these connections which will inadvertently actually potentially harm um people being um interested in the

Quran in the first place so just to give you an example of this some of the things that were mentioned in this um

supposed mathematical Miracle so the 54th chapter of the Quran is named after the moon soah alar and it mentions the

moon in its first verse um so someone was saying okay well there are 1 , 389 verses after this

verse so from this verse until the very end of the Quran there's 1,389 verses well it turns out the year

1,389 after Hijra is the year 1969 if you convert it to our Gregorian calendar this is the year that Apollo 11 set foot

on the moon that's one claim um the time that the astronauts Departed the moon was um

154 uh 1 seconds p.m in U this I believe it's an American time zone um and then the Moon being split in relation to this

the Moon being split uh in verse 541 the first verse of Al it makes a reference to the Moon is split um is perhaps

predicting Apollo's departure time this departure time of 54 minutes and 1 seconds um and taking back the samples

is representative of splitting the moon you're taking one part away from the other so that's another claim I thought

I thought you meant the splitting as in let's split you know you me let's depart but you didn't mean I misunder why why

not we could even say that why not yeah right and the point is to show anything could go if you like tie it like this

way and finally the first verse ofah alar the Surah of the chapter on the moon has 22 letters and the Apollo 11

crew happened to take back 21.7 kg of moon rock with them which if you round it up to 22 clearly indicates that the

Quran predicts the amount of moon rocks that Apollo 11 would return with so and someone actually argue this you say on a

website yeah and I'm not ridiculing the person I'm just you know because I genuinely think this person was

well-intentioned well meaning because the rest of their blog seems quite sober and and meaningful but this is a post

that indicates even more so that people like this can fall easily into the Trap of trying to draw these connections and

they think well what's the harm but the harm is that it might discredit the entirety of the study um of the Quran

from mathematical perspectives because I I would say this is overreaching these two events that we've seen in these

claims are connected with a lot of loose cables I would say so for instance the first claim there are indeed 1,389

verses after this first verse um but that choosing that as a reference point was based on the fact that the moon was

referenced for example in this um verse but the Moon is reference in all sorts of other places too so choosing this

point of reference seems arbitrary and that's the key concept here it seems arbitrary and that's going to come up a

lot um also why are we converting it to the Gregorian calendar yeah that's really arbitr as well yeah yeah and you

know there's a lot of human invention related aspects that they're trying to connect it with which just draws it

further and further away to fundamental truth unchanging truth um the second claim that verse 541 is a reference to

to the departure time of AP poloo well the hour is ignored um the timing so because that number one at the beginning

is ignored the timing is based on Hardware like clocks that could be calibrated differently the units of time

were invented after the quranic Revelation like these specific units of time um and the time can be at any

arbitrarily precise degrees such as 1 hour 54 minutes and 0.0 you know 800 milliseconds in um whereby the link is

now lost it's not 541 now and um interestingly the blog post I took this from they actually acknowledged that

there are these nuances if you do any arbitrarily precise measures you kind of lose the link but they were arguing well

people round round in science in the scientific Community all the time so rounding up is fine and so the link

holds but I think they failed to realize that that in and of itself was indicative of how arbitrary the

connection they were making was and then finally this verse about um the you know verse uh the first verse of Sur Kamar

has 22 letters Apollo 11b 20 kilog 2 of moonrock um kilograms are also a human invented unit after the Quran also why

not in pounds or ounces additionally there's the same issue of rounding it's 21.7 I mean yeah so the the point to

illustrate here is that if anyone really is interested in this in this study and I'm not trying to discourage them from

it is that if you really are you should try and propose things that you find in the Quran that are are not based on

shifting Sands of arbitrariness so things like using units that were invented after the Quran maybe

don't don't rely on that too much or um especially when you're trying to link the Quran to um what are called

continuous numbers in other words numbers that can be arbitrarily precise like heights lengths times um you'll

always be sort of fighting an uphill battle because you're trying to link something like oh this in the Quran 285

is similar to the atomic number or something where well technically that can be you know the average atomic

number can be different because of like other factors in the atom and stuff basically like trying to avoid things

where the connection seems arbitrary the connection seems to be based or reliant on things that were invented after the

quran's Revelation in terms of units um you know human invented Concepts ET ET um so with that being said um I'm I

am still going to present some things that I would consider you know miraculous in the Quran the point of the

presentation is to actually um propose some and so I want to reveal some no well discuss some important context that

I would like our audience to have in mind to further um realize the you know the remarkableness of what I will

propose so first of all it's well known that the Quran was revealed and transmitted orally it wasn't written on

a written material It Was Written material was not by any means the primary mode of Revelation or of

transmission of the Quran especially in the early part of the prophet's life life peace be upon him during his

Revelation so mainly an oral tradition it's comprised of 114 chapters you can say chapters but usually Muslims stick

to the word suras because chapters have a you know maybe a literary connotation that doesn't exactly apply to suras but

for the sake of um you know Simplicity we'll call them chapters and it has a total of

6,236 uh verses so a lot of material um it was revealed over 23 years of the prophetic Mission and it was revealed

peace meal so it's revealed over you know over two decades a long time and um when I say peac meal um I mean that well

I should have put this point earlier but I'll just first say that there's no editorial process either so when verses

were were spoken by the prophet peace be upon him uh they weren't like you know necessarily changed or there wasn't a

mass event where um many verses were suddenly just Rewritten like at the core of the verses we don't have evidence of

you know the Quran being Rewritten 200 years after it's been compiled or 100 years or even 50 years or 30 years as

far as I'm aware and uh when I said Peace meal kind of goes back to this last point was that the chapters were

not revealed contiguously and I think this is um something that might confuse some Muslims who might not be aware of

it I wasn't for a while but the Quran wasn't revealed by Surah number one and verse the entire Surah number one was

revealed to the prophet before Surah number two was started that wasn't the case in fact the first Surah that was

revealed to the prophet um was most likely um the 96th Surah of the Quran uh not the not the first one that we see in

the book um and there's a whole you know study on The Ordering of why the chronological Revelation is not the

canonical Revelation and I think um I think Nan alhan has a really uh like lovely series called um div Divine

speech and Heavenly order um yeah I believe it's called Heavenly order where he like uh analyzes The Ordering of the

Quran at least that's one that I'm familiar with one study of it and it's really remarkable in and of itself um

but just to give an example so I'm looking this is just looking up like the order of Revelation but as you can see

um so the First Column says the order chronologically of when the first verse of that um Surah that chapter was

revealed and the second verse is the chapter's name the third verse is the canonical number I.E what we find in our

textbook like the quran's book sorry today and the fourth column says whether it was um revealed in Mecca or medina

and it's what's what I want to draw your attention to is this last column called note uh where it shows how many

Exceptions there are so for example in this very first um uh row it's about Surah alar interestingly the ver the

Surah about the moon um which was the 37th um chapter or Surah um initially revealed um but it wasn't the 37th in

terms of oh all of it was just revealed in one shot actually for example verses 44 to 46 were revealed um you know years

later um and for example there's another one where it's the you know 55th um ordering ordered revealed Revelation it

takes the sixth Surah in the actual um book um but there's a lot of exceptions as to its time of Revelation so the

beginning few verses of a a chapter or a Surah um and the end verses could have been revealed you know over a decade

apart or years apart and in different cities so all of this is to say that an important context to keep in mind is

that by all accounts by all purposes the Quran is an extremely uh complex literarily stitched book it's not

contiguous from start to finish it was revealed over 23 years it was revealed orally transmitted orally as well

there's you know lots of room for hypothetical error uh if someone was coming from a

non-muslim perspective and especially there are no spreadsheets there are no valid methods of trying to embed

mathematical Concepts into it because these are supposedly if you're an atheist or you know skeptic about um

Islam you're going to be arguing that what I'm going to reveal in this presentation is somehow supposed to have

come purely from a mental uh effort not a written effort because remember like writing wasn't common at the time so

it's just to add to the to the gravity of like you know some of these um patterns in the Quran so to move on to

that um I'll just be showing three types of you know mathematical patterns in the Quran that I think are of Interest so

one is the first one will be word balance in the Quran the second one will be interesting patterns with the number

19 and the third one will be this thing called um the chapter verse Matrix I haven't called it that um I believe it

was a video I watched from Dr shabiri um about this but um Dr sh Al has done a lot of work a great deal of work in in

this area which one can see yeah yeah yeah yeah in fact um pretty much most if not all of the things I bring up about

the number 19 and the chapter verse Matrix I first saw on uh his YouTube channel let the ban speak yeah um the

word balance in the Quan I've heard from different sources and uh I I'll be honest it's the one that I was least

able to reproduce and that is partially in um perhaps in due to the fact that Arabic is not my first language I have

like some conversational Modern Standard Arabic skills but um I would not rely on it exclusively when doing the search so

I thought this was perhaps not my specific field but what I did try and do was use something simple like a quan app

on my iPhone which um has you can I've know people use software to find issue yeah yeah yeah yeah the like I

think I was on the an app it's literally called alquran and it lets you find the number of occurrences of words in the

Quran and I used that so this was probably the most like um least rigorous part of what I'll show today but I still

think it's interesting so what we mean by word balances here are there there are frequencies of word occurrences in

the Quran that appear um you know striking or uncanny based on the meanings of the words considered so I'll

just give examples here um and these were ones that I was able to you know do on my own on my phone like ones that I

could confirm because I didn't want to show anything in this presentation that I couldn't confirm for myself because as

the whole ethos of this is that I want to restore um integrity and transparency to this whole field so for example the

word angels in the Quran this is what I've heard and um I wanted to see if this is true the words angels in the

Quran mik um occurs 880 eight times in the Quran apparently either as singular or plural according to these uh this app

that I searched and it gives the references so I I trust it so either in singular or plural it comes as 88 times

the word angels and what's interesting is that its antonym Devils sh or a occurs 88 times as well either as

singular or plural so that's already quite like you know striking uncanny especially when you consider that

they're not mentioned together all the time Angels devils impairs in the

text yeah yeah yeah because yeah that would be someone's first like question is are they just happen to be always

mentioned together then you'd always get the same but but they're not they're mentioning um distinct places they're

mentioned in distinct chapters they're mentioned in distinct verses which remember like the context of Revelation

they're being recited or revealed over decades in different cities non-c contiguously there's no chance that the

prophet peace be upon him was like taking note mentally of like oh yeah this is year 16 I wonder how many times

I've mentioned the word Angels maybe I need to sprinkle a couple more devils in there or something like that's just

absur absurd to think but someone could say maybe it's a coincidence I think it's unlikely um because the for example

um the Hereafter um is mentioned 115 times and um in in different word

conjugations um so or um it adds up to 115 times and the lowest

world so referring to this world commonly in the Quran is also mentioned 115 times and um I think this is like

also you know pretty pretty striking at the very least you'd have to give it that it's pretty um interesting that

these like antonyms appear balanced even in their word count in the Quran now I've heard of some more of these word

balances but I've also SE videos from Muslims refuting these word balances as well so I wanted to show there are these

word balances I can find at least a couple on my own with my limited skills in the Arabic language um and you

yourself have told me that you knew some people who are more versed in this study and they found more even yes um yeah so

I don't discount that at all I believe there's something here and probably this is the one where I would have wished I

had the most help on trying to research so I'd be very interested in um there there's a footnote this abdim's uh

translation he's professor at soas University same uh published by Ox University press

if you read the uh introduction he does actually uh refer to uh uh academic studies in Arabic actually I I don't

know they translated which which which uh which analyz his remarkable uh coincidence Inver commas that you're

talking about now so uh this is a very reputable uh Source uh which does reference this in an academic article

that's yeah that's that's awesome and yeah I should check it out and if it's if it is an Arabic then it would be I

think excellent if someone could like you know make that accessible to a English-speaking audience I mean yeah

yeah I've never before actually I was aware of that for a long time but I've never mentioned it before but um yeah

he's impressed with it and he's obviously a top expert in the this Egyptian himself you know he and

references these academic uh studies so he's convinced and he's a very respectable top scholar yeah I mean it

would be great if like we could have uh see more of more of that yeah and um more like yeah because again I've seen

some of these word balances being criticized and saying like Okay the number of word that day appears doesn't

actually correspond to 365 and why would it because in Islam we believe in a lunar calendar not a solar

calendar and like some things like that so this this aspect of the study I think can um for for me it can be like it's

probably the least ironcloud of what I'm going to show not just dismiss it because I believe in it I think it's

awesome but um there's a lot of like potential reputations where someone would say okay well you're kind of

cherry-picking which word conjugation you use because in Arabic there's a lot of word conjugation prefixes and that

stuff that can be added the meaning of a word can change in different context do you only count words that have uh the

same meaning um in their different context do you discount the ones that mean something else even though it's the

same word and another one so I'd love to see someone do a better study on this because I'm I would not say I'm capable

at at doing this you know there's diacritical marks on the words do you count the ones that have the exact same

diacritical marks or are you more lenient with that um so but yeah I you know when you're when you're referencing

other people who have done this i' just yeah maybe maybe I'd love to see that uh done and um shown so the thing I want to

move on which will probably be the bulk of my presentation are these last two um Ma IAL pattern so the number 19 has um

been something probably people at least have heard of it being in the Quran and that's because it literally is I think

for good reason people have heard this because um I think it's one of the more unique instances where a number that is

um that we might have seen like you know maybe interesting patterns about is a number that the Quran itself explicitly

references and I think that's a really important aspect to keep in mind yeah so this is

in Surah mud which is the 74th Surah or chapter of the Quran and it mentions that hell is overseen by 19 Angels so it

explicitly says it is overseen by 19 in this context being Angels now the verse that

follows explains an interesting detail about the significance of this mentioned number so it's a relatively long verse

that um explicitly says and we have made their number in reference to 19 we have made their number only as a test for the

disbelievers so that's one reason and the second reason is that so that the people of the book will be certain so if

they were wondering oh is Islam the truth I'm a Christian I'm a Jew they would be certain and thirdly and the

Believers will increase in faith so it'll make people who are already Muslim be more faithful to Islam have Faith

have more and I mean I think this is remarkable in terms of the how

explicitly connected yeah in the Quran this number is to these um factors about faith itself you know it's explicitly

saying we have made their number um and this number 19 this prime number is mentioned just like that so

there are a lot of interesting patterns with the number 19 um and as I've said this is a unique case where a number is

explicitly mentioned as a means of strengthening the faith of the Believers and at least from a mathematical

perspective I'm not saying this is the entire reason why this number is mentioned allaham God knows best but I

certainly think a partial reason at the very least is its mathematical signature that appears in in in several instances

of the Quran not least of which is this chapter itself where it was mentioned first yeah so the point I'm going to

illustrate is that there are uncanny number of multiples of 19 in both this specific chapter and in the Quran more

broadly so just some basic probability the probability of a number a random number being divisible by 19 is one in

19 so every 19th number in integers is divisible by 19 that's what it means to be a multiple of 19 um but roughly it

just means that if I told you a random number the chance of that random number being divisible by 19 if it's a whole

number uh is roughly 5% however probability that two random numbers are both divisible by 19 um goes up

exponentially in the sense that it's now one over 19 so one and 19 multiplied by 1 in 19 because now there are

361 um outcomes uh related to the probability here so that's around 0.2%

chance um three in a row would be 1 over1 19 * 1 over 19 Time 1 over1 19 which would be um 1 over 6,859 so if I

said three random numbers the chance that um if I said I have three random numbers the chance that all three

without you looking at them are divisible by 19 uh is is very very very low and so the chance of n numbers in a

row being divisible by 19 is um 1 in 19 to the power of n which simply means 1 in 19 multiplied by itself n times so

the numbers go down the probability goes down very quickly um and this is important context to keep in mind um

because of how many times this pattern comes in the Quran so for example the number of words in the verse that

discuss the implications of the number 19 that long verse that said their number is to test the disbelievers to

increase the Believers in faith it's got 57 Words which is exactly 19 time three so that's already pretty pretty

interesting um however the number of words up until the verse that mentions the number 19 so right before it um is

95 which is 19 * 5 so this is you know getting quite like un like very unlikely um and then this was very interesting

when I found this out the number of letters up until the word 19 itself so not including but right up to when the

word 19 is mentioned the Arabic word is 361 which is 19 squar it's 19 time 19 um now we're really getting into

like you know this is this would make someone at least raise an eyebrow I would imagine and then um the number

words up to the 19th verse um is 57 19 time 3 again so you know some maybe someone could argue okay maybe you're

cherry-picking the um the number of like wh which parts that you're looking at but I would say even then the

probability that these would occur uh at at this like frequency is astronomically low like is is very very very uncanny at

the very least especially in a document that is explicitly mentioning this number um as a you know phenomenon of

interest that would raise the faith of Believers I mean these mathematical aspects of the Quran could not have been

looked at um you know sufficiently without a computer until like you know in the past hundred years or so for

instance right it's um yeah very interesting I think even more interesting is um oh yeah sorry I just

wanted to again bring up that this is just some literal programming code that I ran to um recapitulate everything I

said so everything I've said actually exists there um is if for any programmers interested they can like

just take a screenshot of this and do it themselves you know um all you need is this um Library this module called P

Quran this software and then you can just copy and paste this code you can scrutinize it if you want and everything

I've said is is there uh so this is just amazing so now moving on um still about the number 19 I mentioned

very early on the first revelation revealed to the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam peace be upon Him is

traditionally agreed upon to be the first five verses of Surah Al famously beginning with read in the

name of your lord who created it's a very famous every Muslim will at least know the story of The Prophet's first

revelation peace be upon him so the number of letters in these first five verses five verses the first five verses

the first first revelation ever the first five verses that were ever revealed to the prophet the number of

letters is 76 which is 19 * 4 the number of letters in the remaining verses so from that point onwards is 209 which is

19 time 11 so that also means that the number of letters in all the verses in total is

285 which is 19 * 15 the number of verses in the Surah itself is also undeniable is 19 Surah alak has 19

verses and additionally it's the 96th Surah meaning that there are 95 preceding

chapters uh in the canonical book of the Quran 95 preceding chapters meaning 19 Time 5 preceding chapters and 19

chapters following it if you include the chapter itself and this also brings me to another point which is that the Quran

itself is 114 chapters which is 19 time 6 um I I I think this is just to me at least I think like rationally I think

this Pur it's beyond coincidence that this many multiples of 19 should emerge in a text by

random especially when you consider the number itself is a sign significance in the text that says yeah it's significant

that's an important point it's not just some random mention the number 19 is really significant it's not just a

random stat you know as if the Quan would just quote random statistics this not how it works everything in the Quran

is extremely significant uh morally spiritually and so on so we are alerted to something when it's mentioned like

that exactly exactly um so yeah like it's just even more reason to believe that the author of the Quran was well

aware of the link between this pattern and the Quran itself and we believe the author in the Quran is is God himself um

so I think this kind of at the very least to me it partially makes it makes very a lot of sense that this is the

partial reason at the very least that the Quran mentions the number of 19 as being a means of strengthening the

conviction of Believers in this book I mean you know someone who like myself appreciates maths because maths is you

know it's it's irrefutable matths itself is irrefutable now if you know we've looked at examples with the moon and

stuff and stuff but the fundamental aspects of math multiples summations arithmetic operations they're undeniable

and I think that's one of the strengths of this aspect of the Quran in illustrating it's um inhuman

origin so I I thought this was really uh really remarkable I thought this was not something that could be discounted and

um yeah and when I found this out myself and like recomputed the result just to make sure you checked all this yourself

then yes I checked this I I wrote the code for this as well it's very similar to the previous one um but anyone who

wants to redo it themselves you can um just have a look at this screenshot uh and if you know some even very basic um

Python programming language uh you should be able to um again reproduce these results so yeah I think this is

like is really remarkable to me and makes me very appreciative of of this aspect of the Quran which makes me even

more saddened to see people dismiss it entirely or even say that this pattern doesn't exist I've heard some people say

well this number you know there's nothing to it in the Quran and these are Muslims and I know they're

well-intentioned but they have been led to believe that it's all just Hocus Pocus and like there's nothing there no

there's something there and it's it's amazing to to take a look at um now the the final sorry I me S

interrup pause a second I want to go back to uh this book because I whilst you were talking I was sneakily trying

to find the reference that I mentioned earlier on podcast so just explain what this book is this is an English

translation of the meanings of the Quran the Quran a translation by Abdul uh halem uh he's an Egyptian so he's a

native Arabic uh speak speaker uh he was educated at Cambridge and many other places and he's professor of Islamic

Studies at the school of Oriental African studies at the University of London the same University where you are

based he's one of the most world's most distinguished uh academics uh in the Quran he speaks English perfectly he

lives here in London and this book uh this translation is published by Oxford University press I just want to read to

you uh briefly uh in the introduction to this translation in a section called stylistic features now this is in uh

page 19 of his introduction he says the following a central feature of quranic style is contrast between this world and

the next occur each occurring exactly 115 times between Believers and disbelievers between paradise and hell

this has been studied in great detail and SCH have found truly remarkable patterns of contrasts angels and Devils

life and death secrecy and openness and so on occurring exactly the same number of times and then there's a footnote at

the bottom this is the reference uh I wanted to mention uh to an academic word in it is in uh Arabic published in k a

now for a is initial now for n a w f a l and then there's a an Arabic title and my arabic's not good enough on embarrass

myself anyway you can find it for yourself easily online and then he continues this sense of balance in the

text has continued in passages where the Prophet is instructed to say and so it goes on but I I just wanted to mention

that these uh he mentions the very same uh doublets or or or uh extraordinary contrasts occurring the same numbers of

time that you do and others as as well between Believers and disbelievers uh secrecy and openness and so on so the

implication being there are many others uh which have been noted actually for a long long time this is not a new study

um but there's a respected academic reference people want to follow it up for themselves so thank you very much

that's awesome thank you so much Paul Subhan Allah yeah thank you for filling in basically on the shortcomings of my

first like part of it on the contrary you you verified all this yourself and so

this no but that that genuinely makes me very happy because like that I felt that was the part where I felt least

qualified to continue far from it you're on very Solid Ground it seems no no thank you no that's actually perfect so

I I feel like you've actually helped like you know complete this presentation so thank you thank you for that's very

very very kind and very helpful and uh yeah um awesome so the very last um thing I want to bring up is this thing

that I'll you know has been called the chapter verse Matrix so again I haven't come up with this cool name this was

dubbed uh at least I found it on Dr shabir Ali's um like uh YouTube channel or his his his team's YouTube channel

that the Quran speak and he's called it the chapter verse Matrix I don't know if he's calling the term but it's not

important the um the point is to just have a yeah look at this so I'll basically introduce this the way he did

I think it was it was best so in the Quran in Surah Al F's third verse um God swears an oath by the even and the odd

and in the Quran um Allah swears Oaths by many different concepts and uh it was known at the time that you know when you

want to get people's attention you would swear by an oath and often a lot of suras start with that so it's to get the

attention of the people and um it's not Al it's also not uncommon that the content of the oath of what is being

sworn by is related or um indicative of the concept or sorry the topic that is going to be talked about so this is uh

God's s by the even and the odd which the reason I bring it up is because it is another um reference that these

fundamental mathematical concepts are being um you know mentioned in the Quran so this is known as parity in maths just

it's a fancy word for saying like what means even and odd but this called parity you know and um it turns out that

this this concept of parity might have something to do with the structure of the Quran itself so this is probably one

of the more like um yeah I would say like uh complex like things I want to show it's not very complex in terms of

the final results but in terms of getting there uh visually it might be challenging so I I I I pray that I can

do justice to it and please interrupt me if anything is unclear so because if anything's unclear to you then it's most

likely unclear to everyone else um so in the Quran we have Surah numbers in the in the book we have today Surah fat is

number one and Surah Al bakar is number two etc etc and the last Surah isah Nas 114 and each of these suras each of

these chapters has a number of verses F has seven verses Surah Al bakar has 286 verses and so on on the 114th chapter

has six verses um if we add the Surah number and the number of verses of that Surah we can come up with this chapter

verse some result so forah f it would be Surah number one plus the number of verses it has which is seven we get

eight for Al Bak it's Surah number two it has 286 verses we get 288 etc etc do it for all the

115 um chapters of the Quran you'll get 115 results right so that's pretty much all we need to do so in terms of um the

Simplicity of arriving there that's it so everything else emerges from just seeing whether that chapter verse sum

result is even or odd so for example the chapter verse sum for the first Surah is even um sorry the even the parity of the

first chapter verse um sum result is even because the chapter verse sum um is eight Eight's an even number for the

second result 288 that's also even for the third results is 203 which is odd and so on so we've just have one column

where we add the Surah number and the number of verses of that Surah and then we just see which of them are even and

which of them are odd yeah that's it so um if we add up the number of uh the Surah numbers in the Quran so if you

add up 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4 plus 5 all the way to plus 114 which's known as the arithmetic sum of the quran's uh chapter

numbers you get the number 6,555 okay there's nothing special yet um if you do the same for the number of

verses in the Quran so each sur's verse number just adding you know seven forah f plus 286 plus Surah Bak etc etc um you

get 6,236 I mentioned this at the very beginning the Quran has 6,236 verses so all we've done so far is just add the

the Surah numbers of the Quran and add the verse numbers of the Quran um then we go back to this chapter

verse Su that we computed earlier which is again simp derived from adding the Surah number and verse number of each

chapter if you add the uh chapter um verse sums of the odd results of this so if you add up the odd

results which I've trying to demarcate in blue it's it's a little bit like difficult to see but if you add every

odd result from this chapter verse sum so 23 125 171 213 etc etc 115 113 of this chapter verse Su result if you add

all the odd numbers first of all you find out that there's 57 odd numbers and 57 even numbers it's perfectly balanced

um which is already interesting and in itself to be exactly 5757 even though like you would say it's 5050 but to get

the exact numbers is still unlikely um if you add the odd results you get the number

6,555 which happens to also be the sum of surra numbers in the on so the odd result of this these 57 odd results uh

sum the sum of the odd results is 6555 which is exactly the sum of the Sur numbers and these two results can

absolutely be different there's no need for them to be the same it is not an inherent property of books like this and

I'm going to illustrate that as well can can I just sorry you you youup um you mentioned that there were

57 um what was it 5 57 game was the total number of it's it's 57 um odd results from the chapter verse sum and

57 even results the chap and if you divide 57 by three you get you get 19 yeah as well yeah so yeah that's also uh

and I didn't even think about that but yeah you know you get you know yeah get multi 19 just to just why not keep the

19 story keep keep yeah in fact I thought it was funny because when you brought up the um Abdul introduction you

mentioned it was on page 19 and that made me laugh a bit because yeah this is not an actual proof this is just random

Ox University press yeah yeah just scary no this this 19 that is 57 is is multiples of 19 that

was the point right yes yes um so the the Su of the odd results so remember chapter verse sum there's 114 results 57

of them are odd 57 of them happen to be e if you add up the 57 odd results get

6555 that's exactly the sum of s numbers which is pretty remarkable because first of all these numbers do not have to be

the same at all second of all consider the fact that this sum of Sur numbers was gained by adding 114 numbers but

this sum of odd results that reaches the same total sum was only gained from 57 numbers half the number of numbers gave

the same result which means whatever numbers it was missing was perfectly counterbalanced with whatever numbers it

was gained um when you're counting like the number of verses in this chapter yeah so that's already remarkable but if

there's double coincidence where if you add the remaining 57 even results so the remaining 57 results which are the even

um numbers in this chapter first sum you get uh 6,236 which is the some of the verses

number in the Quran and I think uh you know people should like seriously think about this

um in terms of like the gravity of like what this is this is an insane double coincidence of balance it is it is

absolutely not inherent to the property of just adding the Surah number and the verse number and um I want to show that

so yeah so this is just putting it in words the 57 odd chapter verse sum results add up to exactly the sum of

suras in the Quran and the 57 even chapter verse uh sum result add up to exactly the sum of verses in

the Quran and this remarkable balance there's absolutely does not need to be this way and to me this is also um

reminiscent of this concept of a check sum in computer science so in computer science a check sum is a it's a value

just a numeric value calculated from data to detect whether there were errors during the transmission of that data so

over the Internet for example right now all like both of our internet Wi-Fi routers are sending and receiving

packets of data you know packets of the pixels on my screen and on your screen uploading and downloading right and um

our computers are inherently running an algorithm just to check that that data that it's receiving has not been

corrupted in transit has not been like interfered with or you know maybe a I don't know some like cable was like

going wrong or maybe it was like um the packet was sent wrong or something like that and the way it can check for

whether it was faulty is by applying a mathematical algorithm to the data to compute a signature known as a check sum

so when the data is received the check sum is recalculated on the receiver's end and it's compared to what the sender

said the check sum was and um if they match the D data is likely intact if not errors have occurred in other words a

check sum is indicative of it's a tool for um verifying the preservation information and I want to give a simple

example because this is maybe a lot um so imagine you want to s a message hello over the internet and let's adopt a

simple numeric scheme where the values of letters are their position in the alphabet a is one B is two Z is 26 the

numerical value of hello will then be eight because H is the eighth letter plus five because e is the fifth letter

and so on plus 12+ 12 + 15 so the check sum someone might say how about we make a check sum which is the sum of the

letters right so you send the message and the check sum to me okay and you send the word hello and the check sum

that should be for the word hello which is 52 then I received this data you know on

on my own time and I received both your message and what the check sum was and if my result is 52 then I know it's

correct if not then I know it indicates lost information so for example if I receive the word hell it show the O is

missing and also this check sum of 52 um then what I would do is recompute oh did Paul really mean to send me the word

hell I would just recompute the value that hell would have so um 8 plus 5 plus 12 plus 12 it adds up to 37 not 52 it

doesn't add up to the checkm you said so that indicates something went wrong and it would be to my relief um that's

that's the idea of of a check sum it's a means of um indicating information preservation now the reason I think it's

indicative and relevant to this example is because um hope this will play if you change um any number of verses in the

Quran so if you add or remove a single verse in the Quran right now you see the number sum of Surah number equals the

sum of odd results the sum of verse number equals the sum of even results but if I for example change the number

of suras number of verses in the first chapter of the Quran to eight from s to eight this balance collapses so the sum

of odd results is no longer equal to the sum of Sur number sum of even results is no longer equal to the verse number and

you can like you know even if I um put this back and then I do it for like a different um if I remove a verse

somewhere I think that's what I do next I think I changed it to 74 or something like the same balance just it just

collapses so this absolutely does not have to be the case so just adding or removing a single um verse and certainly

adding or removing a chapter would remove this balance completely and that to me makes me think of it as a check

sum because it is another of the many means of verifying that what we have today at least has this remarkable

mathematical signature of balance that indicates it has been preserved from the um original

transmission can I just commend you on your graphics absolutely extraordinary I I love the fact that in real time now we

can actually manipulate the number of verses and so on and the effect uh in live time uh that's

remarkable well done thank thank you thank you well yeah thank you thank you it's a pre-recorded video but I do have

the live effect on an Excel sheet but I didn't want to switch to excel so I had pre-recorded this so yeah it is uh it is

live um well originally but thank you thank you very much and um I wanted to further um show that this is not a fe

common feature because I can imagine someone saying they really I mean I think the favorite tool of Skeptics in

this area would probably be to say it's all a coincidence and you know I can't blame them um but I want to show that

you can show that this is very unlikely to be a coincidence in many different ways but a very simple way would be to

show that this doesn't occur often and so I wanted to do just a case study of whether this result this balance this

chapter verse Matrix appears in the the Bible so both Old Testament New Testament and the reason I chose this as

a case study was because I thought it was a good analogy a good analogous sample for a book that has chapters and

it has verses clear verses number of verses for each of the chapters you know typical books don't include how many

sentences are in their um chapters whereas these like um you know ancient holy books do and um it also happens to

be holy book which is even more like in the same analogous field so I thought that was also like appropriate but um

you know so compared with another chapter verse TT such as the books of the Bible this balanced result does not

appear for example this is the Book of Genesis and these are the actual chapter number number of verses in Genesis and

um you know this the red indicates that these values do not equal the values of the chapter sums and the versus sums so

in fact I actually did this um using programming for for every single um book in both the the Old Testament and the

New Testament and everything you see in red indicates that this balance did not occur and this isn't to deride the Bible

it's simply an exercise in showing that even with a sub substantial population size of examples that are analogous in

terms of structure literary structure to the Quran you won't find this pattern of balance of this Exquisite precise double

coincidental incredible balance I even made it easier to find it because I would count even one of the coincidence

is occurring if the sum of the odd results equated to the chapter numbers and call it a day that would count as a

past you don't even have to get the double coincidence of the even result having to mean the sum of the versus

even that didn't occur um so it didn't occur in like any of the 74 books that I examined and again it's not to disparage

the Bible I mean it's not what I'm doing it for it's just simply to use it as a as a case study and it just shows that

this result does not occur often randomly at all um and with this example size I can confidently say at least

empirically it has a less than 1.4% chance of occurring you know it occurs one in 75 books that one being the Quran

and the 74 other books being um like a population study with the Bible books so that's just simply to refute the idea

that it's simply a coincidence because I think it's it's a real reach to say it's a coincidence I think someone would have

a much better rational um argument saying that it was deliberately put there but we'll get to refus that in a

minute as well uh yeah literally now so some reputations just because I'm kind of wrapping up now is um you're

overreaching or cherry-picking to me um so I would say that I try to stick to analyzing examples where the there were

simple and few numbers of arithmetic operations not too many chained together and without good reason I think I always

tried to link I hope it was clear but I always tried to link um the mathematical pattern I was trying to look at with

something from the Quran itself with an explicit key text referencing either the number itself with the 19 or the

fundamental mathematical concept like parity even an odd in the Quran as well um so I Tred to keep it as close to the

source material as possible and with as few operations and very simple arithmetic operations I mean we just did

multiples which are just trying to do summations and picking which of them are even and odd for example

I didn't do you know taking the logarithm of something or taking the exponent of something or converting

something to a complex number and then converting it back into different feature space I didn't do any of that

and um I don't think you need to do any of that I didn't convert pick out which numbers um exhibit some very Niche or

esoteric mathematical you know type of number um I didn't do because simply I don't know that I I don't I don't have

the knowledge to do that but I just didn't I stuck to simple Concepts so that would be my reputation to that

reputation then you know this favorite um line is that it's all a coincidence and I would say if you

believe all of this is a coincidence um considering like the types of numbers and probabilities involved I would say

you probably need to check your um standards of what you consider probable or not um because if you do not if you

call that a coincidence and I say this like you know politely if you call that a coincidence then are you applying the

same standard the same rigor in your day-to-day life I think in um ham Sis's book uh the Divine reality I think he's

called like this an epistemological double standard which I think is a nice phrase it just simply means like you

have a different standard of how you view knowledge of how you view reality based on its context the context suiting

you I mean I think most people if you told them even there's a 20% chance that they'll be struck by lightning if they

step outside today they won't walk outside but if you say if they say oh yeah this is a less than oh it's a you

know 0.01% chance of occurring well that's a chance it must have been the coincidence there um I think that's a

bit unfair and they're free to they're free to uh believe that but I think um they'd probably have to like have some

introspection on why are you insisting on this like extreme um Perfection of an error bar for um anything that doesn't

agree with your world viiew well it's probably like a mechanism of trying to reject it and then you have to like

think about your intellectual honesty and confirmation bias and you know yeah um and the third thing they might say is

that it's done deliberately um which I obviously say yes it was I think it was done deliberately but not by the prophet

Muhammad peace be upon her but by the author of the Quran God uh that's what we believe and I think the easiest I can

say all sorts of reputations for this but I think probably the simplest and most elegant is this argument from

Silence imagine what you'd have to argue to say that this was done deliberately you're saying that in that remember the

context of a revelation no written material you know uh everything's in people's heads basically because it's an

oral transmission revealed contiguously over 23 years um by one human um and the Revelation was uh not contiguous sorry

so it's in different parts are revealed different times etc etc that with all that of a that protocol for compiling

the Quran that someone is there like you know the prophet peace be upon Him is supposedly trying to inject this you

know mathematical pattern into the Quran and oh wait hang on I have to add a new verse let me just make sure this chapter

verse Matrix uh adds up still and oh wait um maybe I should change the number of words here to add up to 19 yeah

that'll be a good one you know all this immense effort that would have been just impossible to do I mean trying to

recreate the chapter verse Matrix as a principle in a text from scratch is challenging uh let alone like that's

with a computer let alone from someone in their mind in the seventh century in in the desert of Arabia um but even if

even if you say someone did all of that why on Earth would they not advertise it by screaming about it if you're saying

that this is a man who claims to be a prophet of God then you would think that he would do anything in his interest in

order to try and verify that claim to other people and if he's done it deliberately putting all these numbers

then surely he would want to reap the fruits of his labor attention to it oh look at this remarkable property exactly

bring attention to it and say look at this yeah yeah and uh and that was never done I mean I there was no trace of

people knowing about this at the time of the Prophet peace be upon him and until way later like clearer a millennia later

until we're finding some of these patterns so I think it's silly so if you say it's not a coincidence um and it's

not cherry-picking and it's not done by a human well then maybe your last Refuge is to say it's done by a non-human super

intelligence like oh maybe it's the devil you know maybe they'll consider him very intelligent or whatever crafty

um but I think this is almost laughable as a contention because um the content of the Quran is enough to serve as a

reputation to this I mean the Quran has no shortage of examples of warning Muslims against the devil I mean this is

a verse I bring up I think it's pretty clearcut um in the 35th chapter of the Quran it says in verse six says Satan is

your enemy so treat him as an enemy and invite his follower only to enter the blazing fire so that doesn't sound like

the type of book The Devil would write he writes a book that is making people very Vigilant about him to seek Refuge

uh from him with God to be good to your parents to um give like um charity you know to to guard your eyes and stuff

yeah that's a very satanic book uh I mean obviously being sarcastic like that makes no sense um so that's

just the brief summary of um the reputations that someone I thought could make some rebuttal they could make I

think at the end of the day they are um no matter how many Hoops you try and mental gymnastics you try and jump

through I think at some point you will have to cover your own logic to accept that this is just a coincidence or from

a deliberate human effort or whatever and there would be some Gap in that chain of reasoning and that's for that

own person to disclose it's not my job to like you know convince them I just present what I find um and to move on I

don't know if this is overkill but it's not just the the mathematical patterns in the Quran and I'm just going to go

over this very briefly because I'm I know I'm going quite over time um but the Quran has no shortage of these like

remarkable um phenomena in all sorts of domains not just mats um for example I've listed just a couple like a few

examples of some that I really like personally um and even listed videos where I could that people can search for

and I encourage them to do that you'll be blown away so like um from this channel Arabic 101 the Quran is known to

make Hebrew word plays um and the prophet peace be upon him did not speak Hebrew you know so like um mentioning

the prophet Zacharia in a verse that's about the remembrance of God in Arabic well the name Zacharia in Hebrew means

the remembrance of God or mention of the Lord um so there's a double on Tandra going there but they only exists if you

know Hebrew and um I know Dr Dr Ali ataii who's one of my favorite on your show uh he's also done a video on this

that's really great I think it's called marvels of the Quran yes I think I've referenced it here as well um so that's

one thing another thing is that the Quran includes remarkably accurate facts about ancient Egypt which was a

civilization uh that was lost to the Arabs and certainly to ourselves until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in

1799 people underestimate museum by the way here in London yeah it really belongs back where

it was found in Egypt this is my plug here for can we please return these artifacts to their country of origin

where we usually nicked them during the colonial period so sorry that's my little ranch though yeah I yeah I mean