A Critical Review of the Need for Knowledge-Centric Evaluation of Quranic Recitation (2510.12858v1)

Abstract: The sacred practice of Quranic recitation (Tajweed), governed by precise phonetic, prosodic, and theological rules, faces significant pedagogical challenges in the modern era. While digital technologies promise unprecedented access to education, automated tools for recitation evaluation have failed to achieve widespread adoption or pedagogical efficacy. This literature review investigates this critical gap, conducting a comprehensive analysis of academic research, web platforms, and commercial applications developed over the past two decades. Our synthesis reveals a fundamental misalignment in prevailing approaches that repurpose Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) architectures, which prioritize lexical recognition over qualitative acoustic assessment and are plagued by data dependency, demographic biases, and an inability to provide diagnostically useful feedback. Critiquing these data--driven paradigms, we argue for a foundational paradigm shift towards a knowledge-centric computational framework. Capitalizing on the immutable nature of the Quranic text and the precisely defined rules of Tajweed, we propose that a robust evaluator must be architected around anticipatory acoustic modeling based on canonical rules and articulation points (Makhraj), rather than relying on statistical patterns learned from imperfect and biased datasets. This review concludes that the future of automated Quranic evaluation lies in hybrid systems that integrate deep linguistic knowledge with advanced audio analysis, offering a path toward robust, equitable, and pedagogically sound tools that can faithfully support learners worldwide.