Quran Violates Zipf’s Law, Unlike Any Human-Authored Book

Quran written on Chinese paper.

For those who need scientific evidence that the Quran comes from Allah — whose signature is at the top of this evidence — look no further than the law that applies to ALL human languages and books: Zipf’s Law, which “states that given a large sample of words used, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. So word number n has a frequency proportional to 1/n.” In other words, if the first word is used 100 times, the second word should be used half that many or 50 times, the third word a third as many times or 33.3 times, etc. (See the amazing video at the bottom of this page to learn how pervasive in all human language this law is. But the producers of that video did not know about the Quran…yet.)

The “large sample” could be a book, such as Moby Dick or the Bible, or all of Wikipedia. All of these follow Zipf’s Law. In fact, all languages follow Zipf’s law. But the Quran does not! Not only that, but Allah the Omniscient Almighty embedded the reason the Quran does not follow Zipf’s law in the actual word rankings compiled from its text: min Allah – which means “from Allah.” He literally signed the results!

Interview with a 700-Year-Old Scholar — How to Interpret the Quran

Ring Composition Quran 3:7

The Quran itself has been miraculously preserved, but its interpretation has remained a source of disagreement, even partly contributing to divisions between Muslims, by definition believers in the Quran. The aya above, a ring composition analysis from Surat Al-Imran 3:7, shows us a path to a middle ground, a guide to interpretation based on the two different kinds of ayat/verses described in sections 1 and 2 above in yellow and bluegreen. Because the scholar Ibn Kathir (c.1300-1373) wrote the explanation, translated into English, that helped me understand its analysis, I interviewed him — remotely, of course — to share with you in his own words.