Retelling the Tale: A Computerised Oral-Formulaic

Analysis of the Quran

Presented at the 2014 International Quran Studies Association Meeting in San Diego
Dr. Andrew G. Bannister, Melbourne School of Theology
andygbannister@mac.com
Introduction: The Quran and Orality
The words oral and orality are frequently used in quranic studies. For example, Shabbir
Akhtar has described the Quran as an oral homily revealed within an oral society, whilst John
Wansbrough suggested that the Quran grew during a long oral period. In similar vein, Angelika
Neuwirth has written of the Qurans oral prehistory and described how it exhibits an oral
intertextuality in its connection with previous traditions.1 Those are just a few of many examples that
could be cited.
But often the word oral has been used somewhat loosely: as a short hand for recitation from
memory, for instance, or to speak of the Qurans oral transmission.2 But as oral traditional scholars
have consistently pointed out, oral is not simply a synonym for memorisation: rather, more
technically, oral tells us about the mode that a text was composed in and that has some implications
for how it should be understood.3
So are there indicators that the Quran was not simply transmitted or recited orally but actually
composed orally? Arguably the Quran exhibits a number of features that suggest that parts of it were
constructed orally, live in performance before an audience. For example, there are the many
performance variants that can be found throughout the Quran, multiple versions of the same story,
which exhibit flexibility and fluidity in their telling. A good example are the seven quranic retellings
of the Iblis and Adam legend.4 Donner asks:

1

See Shabbir Akhtar, The Quran and the Secular Mind: A Philosophy of Islam (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008) 148; John
Wansbrough, Quranic Studies (New York: Prometheus, 2004 [1977]) 1-47; Angelika Neuwirth, Structure and the
Emergence of Community in Andrew Rippin, ed., The Blackwell Companion to the Quran (Oxford: Blackwell,
2006) 140-158.
E.g. Ingrid Mattson, The Story of the Quran: Its Place In Muslim Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 85-92 or Islam
Dayeh, Al-awmm: Intertextuality and Coherence in Meccan Surahs in Angelika Neuwirth et al., eds., The Qurn
in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qurnic Milieu (Leiden: Brill, 2010) 461-498, citing 470.
The three classic studies in this regard are Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), Jack Goody,
The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and Walter J. Ong, Orality
and Literacy (London: Routledge, 1982).
See the discussion in Andrew G. Bannister, An Oral-Formulaic Study of the Qur'an (New York: Lexington Books,
2014) 2-12. On Iblis and Adam more generally, see Angelika Neuwirth, Negotiating Justice: A Pre-Canonical

[M]ight such similar passages be viewed as transcripts of different oral recitations of the
same story made in close succession, something like different recordings of a politicians stump
speech delivered numerous times over a few days or weeks?5
Second, there are the frequent audience asides scattered throughout the Quran: remarks that
seem addressed to an actual group of listeners, more than a reader. For example, the regular refrain
which of the favours of your Lord will you deny? throughout sura 55. Neuwirth also points to Q.
53:59-62 and Q. 70:36-37 as other examples (calling the later a stage directors comment).6
Third, there is the oral milieu into which the Quran emerged: immediately before the Quran,
we have pre-Islamic poetry, which was oral, both in composition and transmission.7 And then
immediately following the Quran, there was the rapid growth of the Islamic tradition, in which the
work of oral preachers and storytellers, the qus, has been well-documented.8 The formative period
of the Quran is thus sandwiched in the middle of a highly oral strata.

Reading of the Quranic Creation Accounts (Part 1), Journal of Quranic Studies 2.1 (2000) 25-41; Angelika
Neuwirth, Negotiating Justice: A Pre-Canonical Reading of the Quranic Creation Accounts (Part 2), Journal of
Quranic Studies 2.2 (2000) 1-18; Jean Butler, Myth and Memory: Satan and the Other in Islamic Tradition
(Unpublished PhD Dissertation: University of Copenhagen, 2008); Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qurn and Its Biblical
Subtext (London: Routledge, 2010) 39-54; Whitney S. Bodman, The Poetics of Ibls: Narrative Theology in the Qur'n
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Fred M. Donner, The Qurn in Recent Scholarship: Challenges and Desiderata in Gabriel Said Reynolds, ed., The
Qurn in Its Historical Context (London: Routledge, 2008) 29-50, citing 34. Compare also Watts hypothesis that the
many repetitions of phrases and verses in the Quran suggest that Muhammad may have revealed verses or passages
in the Quran more than once, with different Muslims remembering the different forms, producing a problem for the
later collectors of the Quran: William Montgomery Watt, Bells Introduction to the Qurn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1970) 107). Michael Cook, The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000) 139 also suggests that Muhammad had a certain stock of material, and made different use of it on different
occasions.
Angelika Neuwirth, Structure and the Emergence of Community in Andrew Rippin, ed., The Blackwell Companion
to the Quran (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) 140-158, citing , 148.
See Mary Catherine Bateson, Structural Continuity in Poetry: A Linguistic Study of Five Pre-Islamic Arabic Odes
(Paris: Mouton, 1970); James T. Monroe, Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry, Journal of Arabic Literature 3
(1972) 1-53; Michael J. Zwettler, Classical Arab Poetry between Folk and Oral Tradition, Journal of the American
Oriental Society 96 (1976) 192-212; Michael J. Zwettler, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1978); Saad Abdullah Sowayan, Nabai Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia (Berkley:
University of California Press, 1985); Saad Abdullah Sowayan, A Plea for an Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study
of Arab Oral Tradition, Oral Tradition 18.1 (2003) 132-135; Gregor Schoeler, The Oral and the Written in Early
Islam (London: Routledge, 2006); Gregor Schoeler, The Codification of the Quran: A Comment on the Hypotheses
of Burton and Wansbrough in Angelika Neuwirth et al., eds., The Qurn in Context: Historical and Literary
Investigations into the Qurnic Milieu (Leiden: Brill, 2010) 779-792, citing esp. 781. Although those scholars may
disagree about the precise mechanics of how oral mode functioned in pre-Islamic poetry, there is no dispute that the
poets were using some form of oral composition. For a thorough discussion, see Bannister, Oral-Formulaic Study,
107-123.
See Johannes Pedersen, The Criticism of the Islamic Preacher, Die Welt des Islams 2.4 (1953) 215-231; Ch. Pellat,
Kass in E. Van Donzel, ed., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Volume IV (Leiden: Brill, 1978) 733-735; Khalil
Athamina, Al-Qasas: Its Emergence, Religious Origin and Its Socio-Political Impact on Early Muslim Society,
Studia Islamica 76 (1992) 53-74; Jonathan P. Berkey, Popular Preaching & Religious Authority in the Medieval
Islamic Near East (London: University of Washington Press, 2001).

Fourth, there is what we might term the folk memory, preserved in the sra and the adth, of
Muhammad preaching extemporaneously: he seemed to have possessed the ability to produce quranic
utterances as necessity demanded it, often in response to a question or challenge from the audience.9
Oral Formulaic Diction
There is one last feature of orally composed texts that has been noted in numerous traditions,
namely the presence of formulaic diction: short, repeated phrases or groups of words that can be reused
time and again to express a key ideathink of a repertoire of clichs and stock phrases. The classic
work demonstrating how formulaic diction is often vital to the oral performer was carried out by
Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Lords book, The Singer of Tales, launched Oral Formulaic Theory
[as] a discipline of its own, a field that [has now] touch[ed] on more than one hundred ancient,
medieval and modern traditions.10
Over the years, several scholars have suggested that Oral Formulaic Theory might be applicable
to the Quran. For example, Dayeh notes:
[T]he literary and technological conditions in which the Quranic text emerged shaped the way
in which it was composed. Residues of oral literature, such as public speech and persuasion,
and formulaic language, are evident throughout the Quran.11
The question is: how deeply engrained in the quranic text are those residues? In 2003,
folklorist Alan Dundes opened a copy of the Quran and was immediately struck by how oral formulaic
it appeared. He investigated further and ended up producing a short monograph, the first attempt to
analyse the Quran in oral formulaic terms. Dundes concluded:
The formulaic density of the Quran is well in excess of 20 percent, the supposed minimum
threshold necessary to establish original orality. Indeed, it would appear likely that if one were
to subtract all the oral formulas from the Quran, one would have an overall text reduced by as
much as one-third of its present length, if not more. The high formulaic density of the Quran

10

11

R. Marston Speight, Oral Traditions of the Prophet Muammad: A Formulaic Approach, Oral Tradition 4.1-2 (1989)
27-37; Bannister, Oral-Formulaic Study, 280-281
John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 36. See also Adam
Parry, ed., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971);
Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 2nd Ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). The key journal in
the field is Oral Tradition, available free online at http://journal.oraltradition.org. For a survey of some of the various
traditions that Oral Formulaic Theory has been applied to, see Catherine S. Quick, Annotated Bibliography 19861990, Oral Tradition 12.2 (1997) 366-484. See also Bannister, Oral-Formulaic Study, 65-106.
Dayeh, Al-awmm: Intertextuality and Coherence in Meccan Surahs, 469-470 emphasis mine.

also suggests that Muhammad was seemingly well versed in the techniques of folkloristic
oral transmission.12
Dundes book was widely criticised:13 partly for its brevity but largely because Dundes did not
know Arabic, thus his formulaic analysis of the Quran was reliant upon an English concordance. As
several reviewers pointed out, quranic phrases that are translated identically in English may have
underlying differences in Arabic. But those weaknesses aside, was Dundes work dismissed a little too
quickly? The sheer number of formulas that Dundes found in the Quran is persuasive, with formulas
occurring across every stratum of the Quran, from the earliest Meccan suras to the latest Medinan
material, including a number of whole line formulas and others that are repeated dozens of times.14
What his results clearly demonstrated was the need for a thorough, systematic, methodologically
rigorous formulaic analysis of the Arabic text of the Quran.
A Computerized Oral Formulaic Analysis of the Quran
In Oral Literary Theory, the classic way to analyse a text for formulaic diction is to proceed
slowly through it, painstakingly cross-referencing every phrase and line with the rest of the text,
looking for phrases that are repeated elsewhere in the work. As one does that, the text can be marked
up accordingly. For example, below one can see Parrys analysis of the first six lines of Homers Iliad,
with the repetitions underlined:
Mh:nin a[eide qea; Phlhiavdew =Acilho:
oujlomevnhn h} muriv= =Acaioi: a[lge= e[qhke,
polla; d= ijfhivmou yuca; !Aidi proivayen
hJrwvwn, autou; de; eJlwvria teu:ce kuvnessin
oijwnoi:siv te pa:si, Dio; d= ejteleivto boulhv
ejx ou} dh; ta; prw:ta diasthvthn ejpivsante

12
13

14

Alan Dundes, Fables of the Ancients? (Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield, 2003) 65.
One of the best critical reviews is Helen Blatherwick, Review of Fables of the Ancients? Folklore in the Quran,
Journal of Quranic Studies VI (2004) 84-88. A surprising number of other reviews misrepresent Dundes position or
descend into apologetics: thus Abbas Kadhim, Review of Fables of the Ancients? Folklore in the Quran, Journal
of Quranic Studies VI (2004) 78-84 not only entirely misunderstands oral theory in multiple places (notably p79-81),
but also rejects Dundes work because it would mean questioning the Qurans divine origin (p79). See also Andrew
Rippin, Review of Fables of the Ancients? Folklore in the Quran, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
Studies 65 (2005) 120-122.
Dundes, Fables, 23-54.

However, there are several problems with applying such a manual analysis to the Quran.
Because Arabic is so highly inflected, manually cross-checking for repetitions is an extremely
laborious process, prohibitively so if one wished to analyse all 6,236 lines of the quranic text for
formulaic diction. Thus one would be forced to study just a selection: but that raises the problem of
sampling. How can you be sure that the sample is sufficiently representative of the whole?15 It was to
solve such sampling problems that oral traditional scholars such as Joseph Duggan pioneered
computerised analysis of texts, using computers to scan an entire text at high speed, looking for
formulaic diction.16 Could such an approach could be used on the Quran?
In the last ten years, two separate research projectsthe first at the University of Haifa in Israel
and the second at the University of Leeds in Englandhave produced morphologically tagged
databases of quranic Arabic.17 Every word of the Quran is entered into a database where all of its
semantic features are logged, such as its grammatical role, root, number, person, gender and so forth.
Morphologically tagged texts enable a new approach to the formulaic analysis of the Quran:
computerised analysis of the entire Arabic text.
In my book, An Oral-Formulaic Study of the Quran, I set out to explore numerous ways that
such a computer study can be carried out. The initial methodology was straightforward: using the Haifa
database as a starting point, I had the computer build a table of every sequence of 3, 4, 5 and more
Arabic words in the Quranconstructing a list not just of their inflected form, but also their root form.
The computer can then cross-check every occurrence in a few seconds, allowing one to see how many

15

16

17

In his classic study, Parry simply used the first 25 lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Parry, ed., The Making of
Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, Collected Papers, 301-304). A similar method was deployed
by Lord in his formulaic analysis of the Yugoslavian singer Salih Ugljanins The Song of Baghdad, which used the
first 15 lines as a sample (Lord, Singer, 45-46). Monroes analysis of pre-Islamic poetry used a representative sample
from eight pre-Islamic poets and poetry collections, checking the first ten lines from each sample against hundreds of
other lines in the same poetic meter in the corpus of pre-Islamic poetry (Monroe, Oral Composition, 32-34) whilst
Zwettler analysed 82 lines from Imrul-Qays Muallaqt, checking them against a reference of 5,000 lines from
Imrul-Qays and other early poets (Zwettler, Oral Tradition, 50, 235-262).
Joseph J. Duggan, The Song of Roland: Formulaic Style and Poetic Craft (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1973) 18-20; see also Vaira Vikis-Freibergs and Imants Freibergs, Formulaic Analysis of the Computer-Accessible
Corpus of Latvian Sun-Songs, Computers and the Humanities 12.4 (1978) 329-339, citing 333.
See Rafi Talmon and Shuli Wintner, Morphological Tagging of the Quran in Proceedings of the Workshop on
Finite-State Methods in Natural Language Processing, an EACL'03 Workshop (Budapest, Hungary, April 2003);
Judith Dror et al., Morphological Analysis of the Quran, Literary and Linguistic Computing 19.4 (2004) 431-452
(431-438 in internet edition); Ryan Roth et al., Arabic Morphological Tagging, Diacritization, and Lemmatization
Using Lexeme Models and Feature Ranking in Proceedings of the Conference of American Association for
Computational Linguistics 2008); Kais Dukes et al., Syntactic Annotation Guidelines for the Quranic Arabic
Treebank presented at the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 2010; Kais
Dukes and Tim Buckwalter, A Dependency Treebank of the Quran using Traditional Arabic Grammar presented at
7th International Conference on Informatics and Systems, 2010; Kais Dukes and Nazar Habash, Morphological
Annotation of Quranic Arabic presented at the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and
Evaluation,
2010.
The
University
of
Haifa
database
can
be
accessed
online
at
http://cl.haifa.ac.il/projects/quran/index.shtml and the University of Leeds database accessed at
http://corpus.quran.com/.

formulaic phrases occur in each sura of the Quran. The chart on the screen shows the formulaic
density of each sura calculated when the computer searches for repeated three-word sequences.18

Quranic Formulaic Density Analysis

90.00

Formulaic Density
[Length: 3 Bases]

80.00
70.00
60.00
50.00
40.00
30.00
20.00
10.00
0.00
1 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37 41 45 49 53 57 61 65 69 73 77 81 85 89 93 97 101105109113

Sura

Some fascinating features are uncovered by this initial computer analysis of the Quran:

The Quran appears to be highly formulaic across the board: depending on the length of Arabic
phrase that the computer searches for, the Qurans overall formulaic density ranges from
52.18% to 23.55%. (Comfortably beyond the 20% often considered to be the threshold
indicating primary orality in many other traditions). The table below shows these results.
Sequence Length
Formulaic Density

3
52.18%

4
33.59%

5
23.55%

Second, some of the quranic formulas found by computer analysis are used many times: for
example, 85 five-base sequences found in the Quran are repeated more than 5 times, with the
most popular occurring 28 times. Among such formulas can be found staples of quranic
diction, such as the examples shown in the table below.

18

Formulaic density is taken to refer to the percentage of a given text that consists of short, repeated phrases. Lord
(Singer of Tales, 130) suggests how this might be used as one test for primary orality: Formula analysis, providing of
course, that one has sufficient material for significant results, is, able to indicate whether any given text is oral or
literary. An oral text will yield a predominance of clearly demonstrable formulas, with the bulk of the remainder
formulaic and a small number of non-formulaic expressions. A literary text will show a predominance of nonformulaic expressions, with some formulaic expressions, and very few clear formulas.18

Sequence
m + f + samwt + m + f

Occurrences
28

y + 'ayy + lladhna + 'man + l

27

llh + al + kull + shay' + qadr

22

'inna + f + dhlika + 'yt + qawm

14

Translation
whatever is in the heavens and
whatever is in [invariably
followed by 'ar, making this a
six-base formula]
oh you who believe, do not
[introductory formula standing
before many negative commands]
Allah has power over all
things
Verily, in this there are signs
for those who

A third fascinating feature that emerges from the computer analysis is how those suras that have
traditionally been labelled Meccan appear to be considerably less formulaic than those
traditionally labelled Medinan. Overall, there is a significant difference in how those two
groups of suras use formulaic language, as the following table illustrates:
Provenance
Meccan
Medinan

Average Formulaic Density

3 Base Sequences 4 Base Sequences
5 Base Sequences
39.34%
23.92%
15.44%
55.01%
37.54%
25.50%

Space does not permit us here to explore what might account for these statistically significant
differences: suffice to say that even if one were to dispute that the formulaic patterning the
computer is uncovering is a sign of primary orality, it clearly is a feature whose use varies
across the different periods of quranic composition.19
Formulaic Systems
We have seen how computerised analysis of the Quran produces rich results, with formulaic
densities at the very upper end of the range often considered to indicate a texts provenance in oral
performance. But in their initial studies of orality, Parry and Lord argued that even more significant
than straightforward repetitions are formulaic systemsnetworks of formulas related to others with
similar wording, groups of formulas that are:

19

Some possible reasons for the difference in formulaic density between Meccan and Medinan suras are explored in
Bannister, Oral-Formulaic Study, 145-146 (see also 194-199).

 enough alike in thought and words to leave no doubt that the poet who used them knew them
not as single formulas but also as formulas of a certain type.20
Computer analysis can similarly be used to search the Quran for such formulaic systems:
looking for formulas that are repeated with one or two key words substituted to adjust the formula to a
new context. For example, the diagram below shows one such formulaic system which frequently
occurs in the Quran when the work of one of the former prophets is described:21
wqy
+ 'lh + ghyr

jy' + byn + rbb

nsh' + 'r+ mr
nqs + kyl + wzn

[Name] + 'khw + [Name] + qwl + qwm + bd + Allah

+ rjw + qwm + 'khr
A second example can be seen below: this next system can be found in at least seven different
quranic verses.22
+ khlq
Allah + mlk + swm + 'r

+ dhb
+ ghfr

kll + shy' + qdr

shy' + (Allah)
yr

In chapter seven of my book, I set out in detail the steps that the computer program runs
through to find systems such as these, and document 30 examples in the Quran.23
By combining these various computerised analyses (a search for straightforward, repetitiontype formulas, together with an analysis of formulaic systems) one can use a computer to perform a
similar analysis for the Quran to that which Parry carried out on Homers work. By way of illustration,

20

21
22
23

Milman Parry, Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I. Homer and Homeric Style in Adam Parry,
ed., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
266-324, citing 10, 275; Albert B. Lord, Perspectives on Recent Work on Oral Literature in J. J. Duggan, ed., Oral
Literature: Seven Essays (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1975) 1-24, citing 17.
It can be found in Q. 7:65, 73, 85; 11:50, 61, 84; 29:36, among other places.
Q. 3:189; 5:17, 40, 120; 24:42; 42:49; 48:14.
See Bannister, Oral-Formulaic Study, 207-237.

on the screen is shown a full formulaic analysis one of the seven quranic Iblis and Adam retellings,
with direct-repetition-formulas solidly underlined and system-type-formulas underlined with dots.
11

wa-la-qad khalaqn-kum thumma awwarn-kum

thumma quln li-l-mal'ikati sjud li-'dama fa-sajad
'ill 'Iblsa lam yakun min-a l-sjidna

12

qla m manaa-ka 'al-l tasjuda 'idh 'amartu-ka

qla 'an khayrun min-hu khalaqtan min nrin wa-khalaqtahu min nin

13

qla fahbi min-h fa-m yaknu la-ka 'an tatakabbara f-h fa-khruj 'inna-ka
min-a l-ghirna

14

qla 'anir-n 'il yawmi yubathna

15

qla 'inna-ka min-a l-munarna

16

qla fa-bi-m 'aghwaytan la-'aqud-anna la-hum iraka l-mustaqma

17

thumma la-'tiy-anna-hum min bayni 'ayd-him wa-min khalfi-him

wa-an 'aymnihim wa-an sham'il-i-him
wa-l tajidu 'akthar-a-hum shkirna

18

qla khruj min-h madh'man madran la-man tabia-ka min-hum

la-'amla'-anna jahannama min-kum 'ajmana

When such a computerised formulaic analysis is applied to the entire Quran, combining both
repetition-type-formulas and formula systems, the computer calculates the Qurans overall formulaic
density to be somewhere approaching 50%.
Conclusions
Computerised approaches to the Quran, drawing upon databases like those from the University of
Haifa and the University of Leeds, can shed new light upon and generate fresh research approaches to

the quranic text.24 In terms of computerised formulaic analysis, the high formulaic densities uncovered
for the quranic text do not alone prove the Quran to be an orally composed document. But when one
combines this significant piece of evidence with the other signs of primary orality that we identified at
the start of this paper, then computer analysis does provide strong corroborative evidence that oral
composition should be seriously considered as we reflect upon how the quranic text was generated.
Tools often leave marks behind on the material on which they have been used: the tools of oral
composition have certainly left their imprint on the Quran we have today.

24

See for example Behnam Sadeghi, The Chronology of the Qurn: A Stylometric Research Programme, Arabica 58
(2011) 210-299, citing esp. 245 which also used the University of Haifa database.

10