Text analysis answers: Is the Quran really more violent than the Bible? (3of3)

Tom H. C. Anderson
January 22nd, 2016

by Tom H. C. Anderson

Text Analytics Bible Q

Part III: The Verdict

To recap…

President Obama in his State of the Union last week urged Congress and Americans to “reject any politics that target people because of race or religion”—clearly a rebuke of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.

This exchange, if you will, reflects a deeper and more controversial debate that has wended its way into not only mainstream politics but the national discourse: Is there something inherently and uniquely violent about Islam as a religion?

It’s an unpleasant discussion at best; nonetheless, it is occurring in living rooms, coffee shops, places of worship and academic institutions across the country and elsewhere in the world.

Academics of many stripes have interrogated the texts of the great religions and no doubt we’ll see more such endeavors in the service of one side or the other in this debate moving forward.

We thought it would be an interesting exercise to subject the primary books of these religions—arguably the core of their philosophy and tenets—to comparison using the advanced data mining technology that Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies and other institutions routinely use to comb through large sets of unstructured text to identify patterns and uncover insights.

So, we’ve conducted a surface-level comparative analysis of the Quran and the Old and New Testaments using OdinText to uncover with as little bias as possible the extent to which any of these texts is qualitatively and/or quantitatively distinct from the others using metrics associated with violence, love and so on.

Again, some qualifiers…

First, I want to make very clear that we have not set out to prove or disprove that Islam is more violent than other religions.

Moreover, we realize that the Old and New Testaments and the Quran are neither the only literature in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, nor do they constitute the sum of these religions’ teachings and protocols.

I must also reemphasize that this analysis is superficial and the findings are by no means intended to be conclusive. Ours is a 30,000-ft, cursory view of three texts: the Quran and the Old and New Testaments, respectively.

Lastly, we recognize that this is a deeply sensitive topic and hope that no one is offended by this exercise.


Analysis Step: Similarities and Dissimilarities

Author’s note: For more details about the data sources and methodology, please see Part I of this series.

In Part II of the series, I shared the results of our initial text analysis for sentiment—positive and negative—and then broke that down further across eight primary human emotion categories: Joy, Anticipation, Anger, Disgust, Sadness, Surprise, Fear/Anxiety and Trust.

The analysis determined that of the three texts, the Old Testament was the “angriest,” which obviously does not appear to support an argument that the Quran is an especially violent text relative to the others.

The next step was to, again, staying at a very high level, look at the terms frequently mentioned in the texts to see what if anything these three texts share and where they differ.

Similarity Plot

Text Analytics Similarity Plot 2

This is yet another iterative way to explore the data from a Bottom-Up data-driven approach and identify key areas for more in-depth text analysis.




So…Is the Quran really more violent than the Old and New Testaments?

Old Testament is Most Violent






Text Analytics Plot 3

‘Belief/ Faith’, ‘Non-Members’ and ‘Enemies’

A key difference emerged immediately among the three texts around the concept of ‘Faith/Belief’.

Here the Quran leads with references to ‘believing’ (7.6%), followed by the New Testament (4.8%) and the Old Testament a distant third (0.2%).

Taken a step further, OdinText uncovered what appears to be a significant difference with regard to the extent to which the texts distinguish between ‘members’ and ‘non-members’.

Both the Old and New Testaments use the term “gentile” to signify those who are not Jewish, but the Quran is somewhat distinct in referencing the concept of the ‘Unbeliever’ (e.g.,“disbelievers,” “disbelieve,” “unbeliever,” “rejectors,” etc.).

And in two instances, the ‘Unbeliever’ is mentioned together with the term “enemy”:

“And when you journey in the earth, there is no blame on you if you shorten the prayer, if you fear that those who disbelieve will give you trouble. Surely the disbelievers are an open enemy to you

 An-Nisa 4:101

“If they overcome you, they will be your enemies, and will stretch forth their hands and their tongues towards you with evil, and they desire that you may disbelieve

Al-Mumtahina 60:2

That said, the concept of “Enemies” actually appears most often in the Old Testament (1.8%).

And while the concept of “Enemies” occurs more often in the Quran than in the New Testament (0.7% vs 0.5%, respectively), there is extremely little difference in how they are discussed (i.e., who and how to deal with them) with one exception: the Quran is slightly more likely than the New Testament to mention “the Devil” or “evil” as being an enemy (.2% vs 0.1%).


While A LOT MORE can be done with text analytics than what we’ve accomplished here, it appears safe to conclude that some commonly-held assumptions about and perceptions of these texts may not necessarily hold true.







Yours fondly,

Tom @OdinText

TOM DEC 300X250


49 thoughts on “Text analysis answers: Is the Quran really more violent than the Bible? (3of3)”

  1. A great idea Tom, really enjoyed reading your series. The speed of your tool is impressive, but it really hit me that a large part of the value of the insight that you’ve derived is the objectivity that text analytics tools like yours provide. This gives the findings a lot of credibility, especially when you combine unstructured data sets and hypotheses/questions which lend themselves to biased and emotionally driven analyses. Nice work!

  2. Fascinating report. I agree with Andreko on the objectivity of your project. The fear of the other is harder to support when given the objective facts of our belief’s similarities.

  3. Very interesting analysis Tom! How about analysing children text books from various schools as it is speculated that some religious schools have violent content in them. So, it would be interesting to see whether there is any correlation between what is taught in the schools and terrorism.

  4. Tom, interesting approach, but it seems that a lot is missing (in fairness, you repeatedly say this is a 30,000 foot view). However, my concern is that simply measuring the issue of “violence” (etc.) is inadequate and very possibly misleading. For instance, there is a huge difference among the three statements below:

    – And Fred killed the non-believers.
    – God told Fred to kill the non-believers.
    – As believers, God commands us to kill all the non-believers.

    The first statement is little more than a news report or a historical comment. The text says nothing about whether Fred’s actions were good or bad. The second says that God commanded Fred to do this, which means God must have supported his actions, but does not necessarily mean God commands everyone to do this – it may have been a specific instance for some reason. The third is a command for all followers of how they are supposed to behave. These are three very different things with three very different applications for believers today.

    Even in one of your examples, you list OT verses of how the Israelites were supposed to detest certain foods. That is a very different thing than saying they were supposed to detest certain people, for instance. Yet it seems that both qualify equally as “anger.”

    Without this level of detail, is not the “30,000 foot view” potentially misleading or even dangerous? I know this is just a demonstration of how OdinText works, but it seems to me it’s also a potential demonstration of how critical a detailed analysis really is, and how cursory analysis of any data may lead to very different conclusions than if you really dig into it. Can OdinText actually parse out things such as this? Me hating the person who lives next door and me hating the fact that my next door neighbor runs his lawnmower at 6:00 a.m. are not equal applications of “hate.”

    Your thoughts?

    1. I think that’s fair, but context can equally play a role in both the bible and quran. looking at words gives us an understanding of themes that are represented, but not the details.

      And FYI, context is what allows Muslims to say that God does not command to kill disbelievers. In fact, Muslims are technically not supposed to murder disbelievers, since disbelievers can potentially convert

  5. Hi,

    Just a note that you selected The Holy Qur’an (1917, 4th rev. ed. 1951) by Maulana Muhammad Ali “because this version is more widely used and the data are more easily accessed.” There probably is not much of a difference in this translation of the Quran as compared to another. However, Maulana Muhammad Ali was an Ahmadi and this sect is considered outside the folds of Islam and is a minority, albeit a large size one. I am not interested in starting any debate about who is and who isn’t but thought to mention it.

    The results are fascinating.

    Another note about the texts in original languages. If analysis is carried out, I am wondering what it might reveal as to the use of words to describe the meaning. For example, the Quran is considered very direct in its approach to sending a message. It uses fewer words to convey ideas, something one may not expect. Arabic and Hebrew are semitic and Greek is Indo-European so can we know how those might be factors (in terms of language constructs) in the use of words and their meaning? Thank you.


  6. Very interesting report. I have not come across a tool such as ‘Text analysis’ before but read about your product via the huffingtonpost news source, it looks very interesting. Nice work Tom, really enjoyed reading this. Thank you.

  7. Ron, if you put interpretation of statements, this is more bias and subjective.

    I take your example :
    And Fred kill the non believers, someone might be read that this is just history, but another might be read since God say nothing about that and it is written, so we must follow this.

    As believers, God command us to kill non believers.. Someone may be think this is general command to all of believers, but someone may be think that we must understand the context why God command us like that, and we must compare with other text, about relation of non believers and believers.

    interpretation about statement in natural language is far more subjective because of statement is not a complete statement that covers all possible condition like we have do in computer programming.

  8. >it appears safe to conclude that some commonly-held assumptions about and perceptions of these texts may not necessarily hold true.

    I hope, for your customers sake, your analysis of non-religious texts is better than this. As Ron points out, simple “word” analysis without context is misleading and leads to wrong conclusions. Ignoring outliers like “The Merciful” is just irresponsible and obviously biased.

    How about you try an analysis of the top 10/100 AP stories per day for the last 5/20 years and connect it to the phrases “Jew/Jewish”, “Christian” and “Muslim/Islam” using these techniques. I’d like to see those results.

  9. Nice effort here however, one point everyone reading this must consider that these are based on English translations and switching from one translation to other could change the outcome.
    this data however should encourage people to read more and go to the source which is real text and validate the finding.
    Quran is intact in its original text form so it should not be a problem for anyone who would like to validate this further and look at variation of translated words compared with the original Arabic text.

  10. This was a very interesting read and appears to show some similarities between the Abrahamic religious texts.
    It would be great if you were able to apply the same methods on Non-Abrahamic religions.

  11. Great project – thank you. But Ron Sellers raises an important point. There are plenty of descriptions of violence in the bible without any suggestion of approval for it; the Good Samaritan story is an example. Is this true also of the Quran? Could you do the textual analysis linking imperative or command words to violence? Perhaps that would be more telling.

  12. I have to second Ron on this one. I’ll go further and say that any decontextualised analysis of vocabulary cannot possibly lead to any meaningful results in this case. Personally, I am a bit confused as to why you would publish such a superficial study. I can understand the attraction of the counter-intuitive results, and its easy to suppose that since they go against widely-spread expectations, they have to correspond to some sort of objective truth obscured by cultural bias – I certainly understand the sentiment, but an objective approach has to go along with the right methodology. Badly done research won’t yield meaningful results no matter how impersonal the procedure. You do stress the the fact that this is indeed superficial and out-of-context, and I can appreciate that – but it only makes me wonder more why you would even decide to publish these findings.


    1) You haven’t read Quran. You’ve just run the word counting program.

    Read the “fine” thing first. Then tell us all what you have really read.

    2) You haven’t counted islam holy texts correctly. Quran is the equivalent of the 10 commandments. Their Hadiths are the equivalent of the Old or New testament. If you count them too, the results are much different.


    1. Your comment is also misleading, due to the fact that the Old Testament is the book of ancient Judaism. The New Testament is the instruction manual for Christians following Christ. While the Old Testament is of great value in wisdom and inspiration, it is not the Christian’s instruction manual.

      The Quran, is the Muslim’s instruction manual. What it contains, are instructions for Muslims to follow.

      However, in the New Testament, you will find that there are NO verses which instruct Christians in any circumstances in doing violence. Naik and one or two others, enjoy misquoting verses to try to make them seem violent, however, any intelligent reader will realise that in each case, he has taken these totally out of context. Anyone reading the Quran however, will find many verses of a very shocking nature, as you very well know. (I don’t need to quote them for you).

    2. Just want to montion that the Quoran is the holly book for muslim, and it is equivalent to new and old testament and it is the only one that is considered true a 100% by muslim hadith are a source of relugion too but they are not as fiable as the Quoran. That why you can find contradiction and no sense on them.

  14. This is an interesting use of software, however, the results demonstrate perfectly, the limitations of this kind of program and what it fails to tells us objectively. What it has succeeded in, is counting a certain category of verbs or adjectives, which may allude to violence of some kind. It fails on the objective measure of what this information actually tells us or what it doesn’t tell us. In other words, there is a serious disjunct between the resulting Data and its objective interpretation. When a text like the Bible or the Quran is read, it is interpreted by the reader’s level of understanding of the text, to give it meaning. Without this interpretation, it is fair to say that at best, the text can range from being literally clear, through ambiguous, to being totally misleading in a literal sense. The Bible and the Quran are intrinsically very different kinds of texts. The Bible is a historic collection of many different types of writing to many different audiences, for many different purposes and thus can never be read with the same kind of interpretation throughout its pages – ie, if it is poetry (Psalms), it needs to be read as poetry, not as history or science. If it is instruction on temple worship, then it concerns ancient Israel’s religious past; if it is history, it is not intended to be read as an instruction to action, but is rather a record of the past. If it is instructional as in the case of the New Testament and the Quran, then it is intended to guide the behaviour and practice of its followers in a literal way, ie: Instructional text was written to instruct our behaviour – for the Christian, this is the New Testament; for the Muslim, this is the Quran.

    So the achievement of this study, reveals that the question that it is stated to be answering,
    “Is the Quran really more violent than the Old and New Testaments?” , is not answered by the data that has been produced. The data is merely making an association between the expressions used in the texts and the use of words which may be expected to express some form of violence. The program itself is unable to intelligently discern and interpret the meaning of these expressions and thus the result that has been reported lacks real meaning. A more accurate question that this program could have answered was: “Does the Quran contain more words or expressions associated with violence, than the Bible?”….and the answer to this would probably yes, because
    a) the Bible is infinitely bigger text
    b) the Bible covers 3000 years of history, while the Quran only covers 20 odd years or so. Therefore by virtue of its short conception and length, it will contain less expressions associated with violence.

    This shows therefore that the conception of this program’s inquiry, was itself flawed by not comparing like for like! For instance, the Quran as an instructional book for Muslims, has its counterpart, the New Testament as the instructional book for Christians. Both of these books are the instructional manuals for Islam and Christianity, while the Old Testament or Tanakh is in reality, the scriptures of ancient Israel’s Judaism. This is not to say that the Old Testament does not provide wisdom or understanding, because it clearly does, however, in practice the distinction has to be made that Gentile Christians are supposed to follow New Testament teachings, not Old Testament Judaism.

    In summary, the question that this study posed, “Is the Quran really more violent than the Old and New Testaments?”, is not only ambiguous, but doesn’t actually have very much meaning at all. To have a more meaningful and informative program, a great deal more sophistication would be required, to be able to interpret the data it produces into a simulation of meaningful human interpretation. This would necessitate a very large input of commentary material from both Islamic and Christian sources, which would be necessary in order to make any meaningful interpretation of the like for like, New Testament and Quran instruction manuals. For instance, interpretation of the Quran would require input, assimilation and interpretation of the Hadith’s, the Tafsir’s and Sunnas. For the New Testament, the program would need to input, assimilate and interpret biblical commentaries. In addition, the original languages of the texts would need to be input and translated internally to find the correct meanings. This would involve the program translating and interpreting Arabic, Hebrew and Ancient Biblical Greek.

    I’d pause to say, that this project to be truly meaningful to anyone, would be exceedingly large and require many people working for many years to accomplish it! That’s not to say it is not possible or even potentially helpful in the future, but the concern that I have, is that this study’s question: “Is the Quran really more violent than the Old and New Testaments?”, is typical of the kind of question that neo atheists put to Christians or as an argument against Christians, with the same kind of error behind the question – an uninterpreted or even worse, misinterpreted use of data! The result is of course that meaningless statistics are used as mudslinging, even though the data itself has little or no meaning. I am sure that this study will be a gift to such people who wish to use this data as “scientific proof” of their position!


    You conclude that, after effictively doing not much more than word counts? Realy?

    The world is horrible, people murder, rape, kill, mutilate, steal, enslave each other, as if killing is best, as if murder is best, as if rape is best; which faithful soul will not cry to heaven over this?

    The doubters think, that love, forgiveness, kindness, mercy and charity are to be supreme, as if love is best, as if kindness is best; faithful souls due to their meekness, we will prevail!

    (Thats not a quotation from anywhere, i just made them up.)

    You’re one dimensional test would qualify the first statement as far more violent than the second; yet, at once anybody would realize that the first is a critique of violence and implies a call to shed the world of violence, while the second is at best a critique of certain values as weak and at worst part of an encouragement to use violence against those called to be to meek.

    Due to totally failing to identify such important context, the results of your algorithms are practically useless.

  16. If only Jews and Christians or Hindus and Buddhists were waging war on the 4 corners of the earth and beheading, raping and enslaving in the name of their god and religion.
    What value is there in all of these data sets when they don’t reflect anything like the reality the world is facing today or throughout history for that matter?
    More of an exercise in academic masturbation and rhetorical ballet.

  17. Tom, Super disappointing failed attempt on a really great idea. There are kinds of adjustments and considerations that need to be made to your data to make it useful. For instance; Factor A) Islam has a rigorous adherance to Shari’a law which insists upon following through on it’s literal interpretations of the Koran. Factor B) The Koran is directive and literal in it’s insistence upon war, violence, mysogyny, non-befriending of non-Muslims, oppressive taxation of non-muslims, etc… FACTOR C) The Bible is a Spiritual text. Strong consideration needs to be given to this fact. Also, your use of the term “Old testament” is very anti-semetic and offensive. FACTOR D) Consideration needs to be given to the examples laid down between Moses, Christ and Mohammad. I endorse neither. I’m just saying, this is the ultimate test. Not as read in the Koran, Torah and Christian Bible, but as known for fact, in the case of Mohammad. I don’t recall Christ beheading men, marrying 9 year old girls, having multiple wives, making war and pillaging. Your premise is very interesting though. I will give you that.

  18. this is interesting ..with all the respect for sure They did waste their time on this development.. easy Answer for my fellow friends if they do ask me what is the different in between my answer: same bullshit different day….. 21 century and we are still trying to compare which one is better, after all this years and education/ history We should understand Religion it is not here to save us, No matter what you do practice , Make a Note that we Human Are Eliminating each other by the Name of God and Religion .. wake up Friend Wake up..

  19. Hi
    The number of verses in arabic quran is 6236 and the words are 77439 .
    So average verse contains 77439/6236 = 12.418
    There are 164 violent verses calling Muslims to wage war against khafirs.

    Now the violent verses ratio =164/6236=2.62 %

    See the famous verse of sword 9.5 (Maulana ali translation )


    This verse has 51 words . Ho many words of 51 can be considered as violent?
    At most 4( slay, , besiege, ambush,captive)
    Same way If we take the hole quran the
    ratio is 4*164/ 77439=0.84!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    So the ratio becomes one third.
    Funny approach.

    Now the author has to explain how many words from the 164 verses he considered violent for his analysis???
    Thank you

  20. Tom,

    I find it difficult to evaluate your exercise without having

    (a) the actual data file with the words and verses etc. categorized (i.e., what are the instances of “Joy,” what kinds of instances of “violence,” etc.), and

    (b) a methods section describing the procedure such that it could be replicated (i.e., the standard for any published study).

    It is now fairly common for researchers to make their data sets publicly-available online so that others can evaluate them. Will you be posting the actual data file so that it can be downloaded and evaluated, and provide a description of the methods so your results can be replicated?

    It would also be helpful for you to provide at least a brief free trial of your software for those of us who would like to evaluate it and your methods. That said, if you don’t offer a free trial, I think it would be fair for you to provide readers with the data file that could be processed using other software and a detailed methodological description.

  21. I like the analysis idea, but would not have chosen the Maulana Muhammad Ali version of the Quran because it it dated in a way similar to the King James, because it uses archaic terminology rather than modern language, so I feel the study should be redone. Also, I’m glad you added the disclaimer that this is a high level view and not to be considered conclusive. Sadly, Muslims are presenting it as conclusive.

    Here’s another idea to run on both texts – look for most common phrases. Here’s an example:

    Top 30 phrases of the Koran

    Rank / 5-word phrase / Occurrences

    1 the heavens and the earth 137
    2 in the name of allah 115
    3 allah the beneficent the merciful 114
    4 name of allah the beneficent 114
    5 of allah the beneficent the 114
    6 the name of allah the 114
    7 of the heavens and the 63
    8 heavens and the earth and 57
    9 who believe and do good 48
    10 is in the heavens and 46
    11 keep your duty to allah 46
    12 those who believe and do 46
    13 on the day of resurrection 45
    14 the lord of the worlds 41
    15 and keep your duty to 38
    16 there is no god but 37
    17 of power over all things 34
    18 possessor of power over all 34
    19 in the heavens and the 33
    20 whatever is in the heavens 32
    21 bounties of your lord will 31
    22 lord will you deny 31
    23 of the bounties of your 31
    24 of your lord will you 31
    25 the bounties of your lord 31
    26 then of the bounties of 31
    27 those who keep their duty 31
    28 which then of the bounties 31
    29 your lord will you deny 31
    30 is possessor of power over 30

  22. as many others have pointed out, the simple occurance of words without context is highly misleading
    you should compare when violence is simply mentioned as having happened, and when god commands it to happen, and so on

    your assertion regarding mercy is misleading too because this mercy, is of course, reserved for Muslims
    (though the same is true of the Christians god mercy too, no?)

    for those who need it repeating: the author himself states: “”analysis is superficial””

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  24. The MAIN DIFFERENCE is that the biblical descriptions are LIMITED IN TIME AND SPACE. In other words it is mostly historical. The Koran in contrast contains STANDING COMMANDS. A major difference. So I would say this analysis counts against Odintext and ‘mechanistic’ frequency based analysis.

    Also keep in mind that the Koran was written in only 22 years by one person, and so it doesn’t cover much history. The bible on the other hand, was written over a period of one and a half millenia, by multiple authors, and is FAR richer in terms of historical logs and description. So yes, I would then expect more descriptions of violence.

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