The A01 Corpus
A Digital Gateway to 80 Classical Commentaries, the Qurʾān, and Persian Hypertexts
The A01 Tafsīr Corpus brings together one of the most extensive curated digital collections of Qurʾānic exegesis available today. It comprises:
- 80 Arabic Tafsīr works digitized and originally published by the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute on Altafsir.com,
- the Qurʾān in TEI-XML (Corpus Coranicum), and
- Jalâl al-Dîn Rūmī’s Persian Masnavī, also in TEI-XML.
All texts are accessible through the A01 Tafsir-Web Application, which supports rapid search, TEI-aware navigation, annotation, and AI functions, such as similarity filtering based on document embeddings.
Tafsīr as Genre: Diversity and Structural Coherence
Tafsīr is historically diverse, ranging from transmitted, linguistic, theological, juridical, and Sufi approaches to varied authorial styles (for Tafsīr as a genre, see Sinai 2009; Görke and Pink 2014; Pink 2010; Pink 2011; for its history and doctrinal diversification, see Gilliot; Rippin; Shah and Abdelhaleem 2020). Despite this variety, classical Tafsīr maintains a shared metatextual architecture: a verse-by-verse exposition anchored to the same Qurʾānic hypotext.
This structure makes Tafsīr exceptionally well suited to comparative and diachronic analysis. Because all commentaries respond to the same sequence of verses, researchers can trace how metaphors, doctrinal positions, and interpretive strategies develop across centuries, regions, and intellectual traditions.
To strengthen this diachronic perspective, our approach follows the chronological ordering of the Qurʾān proposed by Sinai (2009) and Neuwirth (2010), based on Nöldeke (1909) and applied in the Corpus Coranicum project (Corpuscoranicum.de, 2007–2024). Integrating this chronology allows us to map the development of key metaphors—such as the ṣirāṭ (“straight and solid road”)—across the Qurʾān and Tafsīr, tracing their evolution within and beyond the Arabic exegetical tradition (Seidel & Büssow 2025a).
The Masnavī - Extending the Transtextual Scope
Rūmī’s Masnavī enriches the corpus in three key ways:
- Filling the Non-Arabic Gap: Persian exegetical engagement with the Qurʾān constitutes a major interpretive tradition. Including the Masnavī provides access to a Persian discursive world, especially valuable for studying metaphors of “way,” “path,” and guidance central to the A01 project.
- Capturing Hypertextual and Metatextual Relationships: The Masnavī is not a Tafsīr in the classical sense, yet it functions as a Qurʾānic hypertext and a metatextual commentary. Rūmī presents it as an “unveiler of the Qurʾān”, and it sparked its own chain of commentaries—making it simultaneously a Qurʾānic hypertext and a second-degree hypotext.
- Preparing for Future Corpus Growth: The project aims to expand the corpus with additional Persian Tafsīrs and other second-degree hypotexts, such as the Persian Bayān, thereby enabling large-scale, multilingual, and multi-layered transtextual research.
Methodological Grounding
The A01 corpus is designed to support a combined philological, metaphor-analytic, and digital-humanities methodology:
- Transtextual Theory: Our analysis is grounded in the concept of transtextuality as defined by Gérard Genette — a taxonomy of textual relations (intertextuality; paratextuality; metatextuality; architextuality; hypertextuality) that helps us understand how Tafsīr works relate to their hypotext (the Qurʾān) and to one another. We apply this framework in a novel way to the Qurʾān–Tafsīr constellation: treating the Qurʾān as the hypotext, and Tafsīr works as metatexts / hypertexts commenting upon and transforming that hypotext. (For theoretical discussion of this application see Seidel, forthcoming.)
- Metaphor Annotation: Using the CRC 1475 Annotation Guideline and the Metaphor Papers framework, we mark lead metaphors, explicative metaphors, and their interpretive trajectories (including the ṣirāṭ metaphor explored in Seidel & Büssow 2025b).
- Digital Corpus Methods: The A01 Tafsīr-Web Application allows verse-aligned comparison across dozens of works, TEI-based linking between Qurʾān, Tafsīr, and Persian texts, and automated parsing for quantitative exploration.
Because the corpus combines the structural consistency of classical Tafsīr with additional Persian hypertexts, it is ideally suited for both close hermeneutical reading and distant reading digital analysis.
The 80 Arabic Tafsīr works were first scraped by Dr. Martínez González, refined, and compiled into a JSON corpus (Martínez 2016), which was later integrated into the larger OpenITI corpus (Nigst et al. 2023). This JSON corpus was subsequently processed and enriched with metadata and linguistic information by Adrian Bernhard in his master’s thesis (Bernhard 2024). The corpus is maintained, refined, and continuously expanded by the A01 project team.
The Tafsīr corpus comprises 80 Tafsīr texts, the Masnavī, and the Qurʾān with a total size of approximately 72,034,114 tokens. It includes works of widely varying lengths, ranging from over 3 million tokens (al-Ālūsī) to about 169,000 tokens (ʿAbd al-Salām), some of which are incomplete. The corpus contains Arabic Tafsīr texts dating from approximately 722 CE (based on the death dates of the authors attributed to the works, see below) up to recent times (see Figure 2). In terms of regional distribution, it primarily consists of texts from the Middle East and lacks representations from significant regions such as India and Southeast Asia.
These regional and chronological biases were already inherent in the original AlTafsir.com collection, which pursued a particular political aim, namely, to “[…] adopt an ecumenical, inclusive, comprehensive, and ideologically independent approach, claiming to encompass ‘standard Classical and Modern Commentaries […] of all eight schools of jurisprudence’” (Bernhard 2024, 48) and are further underlined by the vast number of unedited and non-digitized Tafsīr texts that still exist (see Ross 2023).
In addition to the previously mentioned regional and chronological information, the Tafsīr corpus also includes metadata in the following categories, which are continuously evaluated and refined:
- Theological schools
- Law schools
- Exegetical interests
It is important to note that the assignment of these metadata categories to individual Tafsīr texts is carried out through their respective authors. For instance, the dating of a Tafsīr text is typically determined based on the death date of its author.
In addition to these categories, the Tafsīrcorpus also includes annotations of Qurʾān, Ḥadīth, and poetry quotations within the Tafsīr texts. These annotations were manually created by the AlTafsir team and provide an invaluable resource for advanced filtering, text retrieval (e.g., searches with or without quotations), and statistical analysis (for instance, identifying which Tafsīrs contain the highest number of poetry quotations; see also Jurczyk et al. 2025 for preliminary studies in this direction).
Regarding the linguistic data, the entire corpus was processed using CAMeL Tools (Obeid et al. 2020). Although CAMeL Tools is primarily designed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), it enabled us to extract valuable linguistic information from the historical Arabic texts at the word level, including (de-)diacritized and stemmed forms. These outputs can be used to generate customized versions of the Tafsīr data for subsequent processing, such as producing a lemmatized version of the text for semantic analysis.
The corpus is currently maintained, refined, and expanded by the A01 project, which is adding additional functionalities such as text embeddings, automated translation features, and advanced filtering and retrieval options through its internal corpus tool (see Figure 4). Both the final dataset and the web application are planned for public release at a later stage.
Bibliography
Bernhard, Adrian. 2024. Development of the Quranic WAY Metaphor in Tafsir: A Corpus Analysis Approach.
Jurczyk, Thomas, Roman Seidel, Adrian Bernhard, Tatjana Scheffler, and Johann Buessow. 2025. “Text Mining Tafsir: Compilation and Preliminary Explorations of a Curated Corpus of 80 Qurʾanic Commentaries.” Journal of Digital Islamicate Research (Leiden, The Netherlands) 3 (1): 97–167. https://doi.org/10.1163/27732363-bja00010.
Martínez, Alicia González. 2016. “Tafsir: Quranic Commentaries Scraped and Processed.” https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/kabikaj/altafsir.
Nigst, Lorenz, Maxim Romanov, Sarah Bowen Savant, Masoumeh Seydi, Peter Verkinderen, and Hamidreza Hakimi. 2023. “OpenITI: A Machine-Readable Corpus of Islamicate Texts.” Version 2023.1.8. Zenodo, October 17. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.10007820.
Obeid, Ossama, Nasser Zalmout, Salam Khalifa, et al. 2020. “CAMeL Tools: An Open Source Python Toolkit for Arabic Natural Language Processing.” Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (Marseille, France), May, 7022–32. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.lrec-1.868.
Ross, Samuel J. 2023. “What Were the Most Popular Tafsīr s in Islamic History? Part 1: An Assessment of the Manuscript Record and the State of Tafsīr Studies.” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 25 (3): 1–54. https://doi.org/10.3366/jqs.2023.0555.
Seidel, Roman. Forthcoming. “Qur’anic Lead Metaphors and the Unfolding of their Religious Meaning: Considerations on the Theory of Metaphor and Transtextuality Applied to Qur’an and Tafsîr”. In By the Tongue of the Heart: Role and Development of Metaphors in Sufi Literature, edited by Roman Seidel and Vicky Ziegler. Special Issue of Asiatische Studien 80/2 (2026).
Seidel, Roman, and Johann Büssow. 2025a. “Mapping the ‘Straight and Solid Road’ Within the Qur’anic Landscape: Development of a Primordial Islamic Way Metaphor.” In Conceptualizing CONDUCT OF LIFE through WAY Metaphors, edited by Kianoosh Rezania, Neda Mohtashami, and Roman Seidel. Metaphor Papers 19. https://doi.org/10.46586/mp.430.507.
Seidel, Roman, and Johann Büssow. 2025b. Annotating Explicative Metaphors: An Annotation Guideline for Qur’anic Lead Metaphors and Explicative Metaphors in Exegetical Texts (Tafsir). Metaphor Papers 31. https://doi.org/10.46586/mp.451.