Team
Who's behind the count.
This began as one person's independent research, built on fourteen centuries of scholarship and the patient counting of everyone who came before. For now it is still a project of one. That is not by design, and it does not have to stay that way.
Lead Researcher
Michael Caswell
This is not about me. The 74:30 Project stands or falls on the count, not on the person who did the counting. The story of the person behind it is part of the wider context, so if you really want to know more, it lives at caswell001.com.
A note for press and researchers: please bring any question to me through the contact page, and to me alone. I ask that no one contact or involve my family or my friends in this. The work is mine to answer for, not theirs.
Built with
Claude
Almost every count in this project was carried out by directing Claude, the AI assistant made by Anthropic. The lead researcher cannot read Arabic, has number dyslexia, and does not write code. Claude did the work those limits made impossible by hand: tallying specific letters across specific chapters, writing the verification script, cross-checking every total, and building this site. It was told what to prove, and shown where it had gone wrong, again and again, until the figures held.
This is said plainly because credit is owed and because it matters for trust. None of it replaces the reader doing their own counting, and the proof is arranged so that anyone, with Claude or any capable assistant, can repeat every step alone. The discovery was surfaced by a person and a machine working together, and honestly, neither could have done it without the other.
Open
Everyone else
No one else is working on this yet. The project stands on the shoulders of fourteen hundred years of scholars, but the active research, at this moment, is a team of one. The seat is open. Anyone who helps verify the mathematics, dig into the classical sources, translate, build, or carry it to more people will be named here, with their consent, as they join.
Join the work
If any of this pulls at you, whether you want to check the mathematics, challenge it, dig into the classical sources, translate, build, or help carry it to more people, there is room. This is an invitation, not a closed door. No one is ever listed here without saying yes first.
To be clear, this is never about money. The project asks for no donations and sells nothing. The only help it wants is help that strengthens the research, or that spreads it further.
Get in touchWith gratitude
None of this was carried here alone. It came through more hands and hearts than could ever be named, and these few words fall short, but they are owed.
To God, first and above all, from whom the whole of it comes and to whom the whole of it returns. The structure was His before it was anyone's, and the gratitude is His before it is anyone's.
To the Prophet, and the messengers, peace be upon them, who carried the message faithfully and asked no reward for it.
To the Quran researchers and scholars whose careful, unglamorous work this project leans on: Dr. Marijn van Putten, Professor Eric Atwell and the Quranic Arabic Corpus, and the long line of those who counted, copied, and guarded the text across centuries so that it could be counted again now.
To the scientists and mathematicians whose tools and discoveries made the counting possible, most of them never imagining this is what their work would one day touch.
To the researchers building artificial intelligence, and in particular the team at Anthropic who made Claude, the tool without which a man who cannot read Arabic and does not write code could never have found any of this.
To the spiritual guides: the writers whose work lit the path from a distance, and the ones who have walked beside me in person and asked for nothing in return.
To the teachers, the ones at the front of a classroom and the ones life sent quietly, who taught me how to look.
To the artists and the musicians whose work has carried me for as long as I can remember, and carries me still. So much of how I see was learned from how they made.
To the doctors, nurses, and healers, the ones whose names fill journals and the ones who have quietly kept me and the people I love whole.
To my family.
To my friends.
And to the strangers, the friends I have not met yet. We were one single soul before we were many, made into peoples and tribes, the Quran says, so that we would come to know one another (49:13), not so that we would forget that we are one. Whoever you are, wherever this finds you, you are not outside this. Humanity is one family, and you are already part of mine.
And back to God, where it began. Alhamdulillah, all praise belongs to Him.