Structural Centering in the Qur’an: A Corpus-Wide Analysis of Pivot Positioning Across 114 Surahs

Summary

This study presents the first corpus-wide quantitative analysis of structural pivot positioning across all 114 surahs of the Qur'an. Using the Six-Pass methodology, each surah's compositional center is identified and its normalized position measured, revealing that pivots cluster significantly closer to the geometric center than chance would predict.

Key findings

• •The mean absolute offset of pivot positions from the normalized center is 0.066, indicating strong central tendency across the corpus.
• •Statistical testing yields Z = −13.58, rejecting the null hypothesis that pivots are randomly positioned.
• •The pattern holds across surahs of varying length, genre, and traditional period of revelation.
• •Results are reproducible from the open dataset with no proprietary tools required.

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