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Comment by asim | Hacker News Reader

I had similar thoughts about using it for the Quran. I think this highlights you have to be very specific in your use cases especially when expecting an exact response on static text that shouldn't change. This is why I'm trying something a bit different. I've generated embeddings for the Quran and use chromem-go for this. So I'll ask the index the question first based on a similarity search and then feed the results in as context to an LLM. But in the response I'll still sight the references so I can see what they were. It's not perfect but a first step towards something. I think they call this RAG.

What I'm working on https://reminder.dev

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I found LLMs to be really good for Quran studies. Especially for questions where Google is unreliable.

In one instance I was trying to remember if it was in the Bible or the Quran where, in the story of Abraham, the pagans are asked why they believe what they believe and they respond with "because our fathers believed" and the scripture critiqued this. ChatGPT gave me the exact verses from the Quran while Google would bring up random unrelated forum posts.

It's also good for comparing religious texts and seeing where stories differ.

GPT-4 specifically seems to have a very good knowledge of the Quran, such that you can ask it for a specific surah and ayah and it'll quote it exactly in Arabic.

Cool project! I asked some questions and got good answers. I was surprised to get results from the Hadith though, as I thought it would be restricted to the Quran and they are (as you know) not the same thing.

Thanks, yea I thought about separating the search but felt like when you're looking for that piece of knowledge it can extend to the hadith and it was important to include it. So much of the Quran is explained in the context of the hadith and prophet's life.

I asked it:

> How can the Qur'an acknowledge the Torah (Tawrat), Psalms (Zabur), and the Gospel (Injil) as divine revelations from God (Allah) yet deny the deity of Jesus Christ. Don't these contradictions falsify the truth of the text?

It gave the classic counter argument:

> A: The Qur'an acknowledges the Torah, Psalms, and Gospel as divine revelations from God, emphasizing their role as guidance for their respective communities. However, it also teaches that these scriptures were either altered or misinterpreted over time.

Of course, the Qu'ran makes these theological assertions rather than one grounded in concrete historical or manuscript evidence. Nevertheless, your app does a good job at fairly representing the beliefs of the Qur'an.

It's possible to accept the Gospel as divine revelations while denying the divinity of Jesus Christ: there's a large sect called Unitarians that do precisely that. https://www.biblicalunitarian.com/100-scriptural-arguments-f... are some of the verses they based their arguments on. Similarly in early Christianity there were many Arian Christians, who did not believe in the Trinity, but they were eventually violently suppressed by the Roman Emperor on penalty of death.

I really liked this project and was surprised to find Hadith section. Although I am confused on what sources are you relying (I have a guess but it is not organized). I liked the answers I got from the search. It even have the same quality in both Arabic and English.

I have a feedback. The web pages Hadith and Quran are not mobile friendly in the sense that you are loading the whole content in one page. Separating into pages with number or doing lazy loading will be better.

Thanks for the feedback. The hadith is bukhari. I'll try to clear this up somewhere and do the same you mention about mobile rendering for the web pages. The project is open source and you can see the data loaded from json in each folder.

https://github.com/asim/reminder

Note: I addressed the issue with web page loading for the Quran and Hadith. Opted for the main page to be an index with contents. Hopefully that fixes things.

Great, that looks much better now. Thanks for taking my feedback

i had written the following in response to a comment that got flagged and has now disappeared. Nevertheless, make of this what you will:

In my opinion, based on verses 17:36, 5:118, 46:15, 96:15-16 and 17:13-15 of the Quran viz "...And We have fastened every man's deeds to his neck, and on the Day of Resurrection, We shall bring out for him a book which he will find wide open. [It will be said], Read your record. You yourself are sufficient as a reckoner against you this Day. Whoever is guided is only guided for [the benefit of] his soul. And whoever errs only errs against it. And no bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another...", it is solely dishonesty and wilfully committing injustice that will cause a person to judge against himself/herself and earn a place in Hell. So it is not necessary that only 'muslims' can enter Heaven or be Successful. The criterion is the application of sense/reasoning and not being swayed by that which is convenient (being born into a religion, peer pressure, personal convenience, prejudice, etc.). In my opinion, i believe that fate is influenced by how steadfastly a person holds on to Reason and Justice. So prejudiced people end up committing deeds that will lead them to Hell like willful falsification and obtuseness. So even 'muslims' who choose the path of hypocrisy can end up in the lowest layers of Hell (Quran 4:145) and non-muslims can also go to Heaven (Quran 5:118). Anybody can understand this, because it makes sense. Sadly in the case of Abrahamic religions, the exegetic literature like Midrash and Tafsir muddy that which is clear. How ironic? But then again, there is a pertinent verse (3:7) in the Quran in this regard: "He it is Who hath revealed unto thee the Scripture wherein are clear revelations - they are the substance of the Book - and others (which are) allegorical. As for those in whose hearts is deviation [from truth], they will follow that of it which is unspecific, seeking discord and seeking an interpretation [suitable to them]..." There is a thin book at https://archive.org/details/TheAmazingQuran.pdf by a mathematician not of muslim origin where he examines the Quran from a logical standpoint which can be a starting point followed by the papers at https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=wmRDl-4AAAAJ on computational analysis of the Quran (including with neural networks) before the ChatGPT era.

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