Exploring Topics and Sentiment in the English Version of Yassawi’s Divan-i Hikmet: A Text Mining Approach

Abstract

Sufism seems to be still vital for the world nowadays. Concerning Central Asia, Hodja Ahmed Yassawi may be deemed one of the earliest Sufi there, and his most famous work, which contributed to the Islamisation of the Turks, is a collection of wisdom called Diwan-i Hikmet. Therefore, this study attempts to evaluate the piece content using text mining techniques. The authors ran a term frequency analysis to uncover prevailing topical terms underlying the text along with their co-occurrence. Besides, the nature of emotion reflected in the writing was assessed based on the analysis of sentiment terms. The findings from the term frequency analysis show that the central concepts in the Diwan-i Hikmet are God, divine love, spiritual education, ascesis, and worship of God through service. Emotion-based data analysis revealed that the overall affective tone of the text has proven to be positive. The current work adds to the research on Sufi Islamic literature. The agenda for future research was specified.