ONTOLOGICAL COMPARISON OF THE INTERPRETATION OF ISRA' AND MI'RAJ USING TOPIC MODELING BERTOPIC

Abstract

The Isra' Mi'raj event is a central theme in the Islamic tradition that contains physical, metaphysical, and transcendental dimensions. The diversity of interpretations regarding the ontological nature of the journey of the Prophet Muhammad PBUH is reflected in classical and contemporary works of interpretation. This study aims to map and compare the ontological interpretation pattern of Isra'–Mi'raj with the text mining approach using BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling technique that is able to identify latent themes computationally. The research corpus consists of tafsir texts from various periods, including Tafsir Ibn Katsir, Jalalain, al-Qurthubi, Tafsir al-Mishbah, and Tafsir of the Ministry of Religion of the Republic of Indonesia. The research stages include text preprocessing, semantic representation extraction, topic formation, and visualization of proximity and structure between topics through intertopic distance maps, topic word scores, and similarity matrix. The results of the study show that the ontological interpretation of Isra'–Mi'raj is grouped into three main categories: (1) physical-bodily ontology, (2) spiritual-metaphysical ontology, and (3) transcendental-cosmological ontology. Comparative analysis shows that classical interpretations tend to be based on literal-physical interpretations, while contemporary interpretations are more integrative with rational, symbolic, and metaphysical approaches. This study confirms that BERTopic is effective in systematically uncovering ontological meaning patterns and making a methodological contribution to the development of artificial intelligence-based interpretation studies.