2026-10-06T12:03:42Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/34041540 2026-10-01T15:13:33Z category_30049 category_30064 category_30079 category_30070 category_30073 item_type_3 month_year_10_2026

A Reproducibility Dataset of Repeated Verses, Phrase Returns, Positional Recurrence, and Structural Function in the Qur'an Syed Raheel Shahzad (24578973) Islamic studies Religious studies not elsewhere classified Other philosophy and religious studies not elsewhere classified Theology Theology not elsewhere classified Qur'an Qur'anic recurrence Qur'anic repetition Refrain Repeated verses Repeated phrases Qur'anic doublets Structural recurrence Surah structure Naẓm Discourse structure ʿAmūd Munasabah Passage architecture Rukūʿ Digital humanities Corpus analysis Reproducibility Syed Raheel Shahzad This dataset develops a reproducibility framework for studying refrain and recurrence across all 114 surahs of the Qur'an.The study distinguishes the observable fact of textual repetition from the stronger interpretive claim that a recurrence performs a specific structural function. Version 1.0.0 therefore separates surface-exact repeated ayahs, normalized full-ayah equivalence, recurring phrase families, positional distribution, inherited passage alignment, negative controls, and later structural interpretation into independently auditable fields.The working corpus contains 6,236 ayahs. The surface-exact layer identifies 95 repeated full-ayah families comprising 274 occurrences. After documented Arabic normalization, the dataset identifies 98 repeated full-ayah families comprising 280 occurrences. The small difference between the raw and normalized layers makes the effect of preprocessing visible rather than hiding it inside the final results.At phrase level, the dataset analyzes contiguous normalized Arabic sequences from three to eight tokens and retains recurring families that meet the release threshold. These phrase-level records allow recurrence to be studied below the level of the full ayah while preserving frequency, corpus dispersion, surah concentration, positional information, and redundancy controls.The study also identifies 13 exact full-ayah within-surah refrain candidates occurring at least three times in the same surah. These include prominent recurrence systems in Al-Rahman, Al-Mursalat, Al-Shu'ara, Al-Qamar, and Al-Saffat. Each refrain record preserves occurrence count, first and last position, inter-recurrence spacing, spacing variability, passage coverage, and Qur'anic references without automatically assigning rhetorical or structural meaning.Every recurrence occurrence is mapped to canonical surah and ayah reference, relative position within the surah, traditional Meccan/Medinan classification, provisional macro-group metadata, and inherited rukūʿ position. This makes it possible to examine whether a repeated unit falls at a passage beginning, ending, near a boundary, or within a passage while maintaining the methodological rule that positional coincidence is descriptive evidence rather than proof of structural design.The package also includes high-dispersion short-phrase negative controls. These controls address a central risk in recurrence research: a phrase that appears frequently across many surahs should not automatically be treated as a locally significant structural marker merely because it recurs.Selected pilot analyses examine several distinct recurrence patterns. Al-Rahman provides a dense exact refrain system; Al-Mursalat demonstrates repeated warning recurrence; Al-Shu'ara contains several overlapping full-ayah recurrence families distributed across prophetic narrative sequences; Al-Qamar illustrates repeated memory and warning formulas; and the Ḥā Mīm sequence provides a cross-surah opening recurrence across seven consecutive surahs.The full package contains repeated-ayah family and occurrence registries, phrase-family and phrase-occurrence datasets, within-surah refrain candidates, cross-surah recurrence records, a 114-surah recurrence summary, rukūʿ-alignment statistics, negative controls, structural-function coding templates, controlled vocabulary, codebook, source and coder registries, research questions, figures, figure data, documentation, and checksum manifests.The dataset is intended for Qur'anic studies, Islamic studies, Arabic textual analysis, naẓm and munāsabah research, discourse structure, literary recurrence, digital humanities, corpus-assisted close reading, and reproducible humanities research.Its wider purpose is to make recurrence claims testable, comparable, and revisable by preserving the distinction between textual repetition, positional pattern, and demonstrated structural meaning. 2026-10-01T15:13:33Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.34041540.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/_b_A_Reproducibility_Dataset_of_Repeated_Verses_Phrase_Returns_Positional_Recurrence_and_Structural_Function_in_the_Qur_an_b_/34041540 CC BY 4.0