JHI-UTSC Digital Humanities Faculty Fellow
Suleyman Dost is Assistant Professor of Late Antiquity and Early Islam. He works primarily on inscriptions and other documentary sources from late antique Arabia and Ethiopia. His research also covers the historical context in which the Qur’an emerged as well as the history of its textual transmission. Before joining the University of Toronto, Dr. Dost was an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His first monograph, titled Before the Qur’an: Material Sources at the Advent of Muslim Scripture will appear from the Edinburgh University Press at the end of 2025.
Fellowship Project: Bringing Order to Chaos: A Study of the Qur’an’s Inner Chronology
This project is a study of the Qur’an’s inner chronology. The Qur’an was compiled after the death of Muhammad (632 CE) into a codex of 114 chapters but the ordering of the chapters did not follow the order of the Prophet’s proclamations of them. In this project, I will collect and analyze data about three variables in the Qur’an that appear to be chronological markers: mean-verse-length of individual chapters, the use of divine names across the text, and the distribution of religious vocabulary of possibly foreign origins. The goal is to identify chronological clustering in the text through correlation and regression analysis.