The seven canonical qurra’ and the codification of Ibn Mujahid ﵀

After Wasit, the second layer of preservation

In the previous article we followed Khalil ibn Ahmad ﵀, who cast the diacritical system into its definitive form and thereby completed the work that Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ had begun with his first vowel points. With the hamza, the tashdid, and the full set of vowel marks, the written skeleton had become not only standardized but also legible, even for those who had not learned the Quraishi tongue from the cradle. In the articles before that we had already seen how the Uthmanic skeleton text spread in the first century AH across fifteen and more capitals at once, with i’jam points as a reading aid for an umma that was becoming non-Arabic.

What did not yet exist was a formal codification of the other half of the preservation. For alongside the written Mushaf, alongside the skeleton and its reading aids, there lived in every capital of the umma an oral transmission line that was carried not on paper but in the mouth. A student did not learn the Quran from a book; he learned it from the mouth of a teacher, who had learned it from the mouth of his teacher, in a chain that reached back to a Companion ﵁ who had received it directly from the Prophet ﷺ. The skeleton said what was written; the chain said how it was pronounced. A scribe who tried to read from a Mushaf without a teacher was no reciter, however well he recognized the letters. Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, who in 25 AH with his commission had produced the Uthmanic copies, had in his own time already established where the certainty lay. The qira’at is a sunna that is strictly observed.

Between the copying project of Al-Hajjaj in 84 AH and the codification of Ibn Mujahid ﵀ in 324 AH lie two and a half centuries. In those two and a half centuries the umma did not invent the oral chain, for it had been present from the very first revelation. What it did do in that time was register the chain, lay it against the Uthmanic skeleton, let it crystallize in schools around particular teachers, and at the end of that development accept seven of those schools as the canonical selection. This article follows that development from beginning to end. After that, this sub-map leaves the recitation tradition and turns to the physical witnesses: the parchment that has come down to us in Sana’a, in Birmingham, in Topkapi, and in Tashkent, and in which the Uthmanic skeleton that we have followed here in the mouth can now be read off in ink.

What a qari’ was

The word qari’ means, in its simplest translation, reciter. In the Arabic of the first century AH, however, it was not a designation for someone who recited in the mosque before the congregation, as the contemporary use of the word sometimes suggests. A qari’ was a teacher. He was the bearer of the whole Quran in its entirety, verse by verse, with the exact vocalizations that he had received from his teacher, and he was moreover the transmitter of that complete text to his own students. He stood in an isnad chain, and his position in that chain was testable.

A student who presented himself to a qari’ did not come to study the Book, as a student today might think. He came to receive it in his mouth. The pace of such a learning process was not the reading speed of a present-day student, but about five verses per day. Abu Bakr ibn 'Ayyash ﵀, who in the second century AH was a respected reciter, learned the Quran in his youth from Asim ibn Abi an-Najud ﵀ at precisely this rhythm. The teacher recited, the student repeated, the teacher corrected, and the student repeated again, until the pronunciation in the voice of the student was identical to the pronunciation of the teacher. What the teacher pronounced was not his own word and not his own sound; it was the sound that he had once received from his own teacher, in a chain that ran back without interruption to the Sahaba ﵃ and the Prophet ﷺ.

What a qari’ was not deserves a name just as much. He was no textual critic, no grammarian who altered a word on his own authority, no pious amateur who could introduce his own preferred variants into the public recitation. He was, in the Companion-phrasing of Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, a bearer of a sunna. No one, says Al-Azami ﵀ of the Sahaba ﵃ who around Umar ﵁ and Hisham ﵁ in the mosque of Medina fell into dispute over a verse from Surah al-Furqan, innovated so much as a single syllable. All the minute details of the pronunciation had been taken over from the Prophet ﷺ.

This is, in the broadest sense, the second layer of preservation with which this article is concerned. The first layer is the skeleton, fixed in 25 AH under Uthman ﵁ in five capitals, and in 84 AH under Al-Hajjaj spread across fifteen capitals. The second layer is the pronunciation, preserved in every generation in a chain of teachers, and at the end of the third century AH fixed in a formal canon. The skeleton wrote what stood between the consonants; the chain said how those consonants and the vowels lying between them sounded.

The five cities, the seven qurra’

When Ibn Mujahid ﵀ published his Kitab as-Sab’a fi al-Qira’at in Baghdad in 324 AH, he did not choose arbitrarily. He looked back on two and a half centuries in which in each of the great capitals of the umma a dominant recitation school had come to form around a scholar. Five capitals, which we followed at the Mushaf that traveled to the five cities as the destinations of the Uthmanic Mushaf dispatch of 25 AH: Medina, Mecca, Basra, Damascus, and Kufa. In four of those five he chose one qari’; in Kufa, where the recitation tradition had broadened around three independent schools, he chose three. Thus they became seven.

In Medina he chose Nafi’ ibn Abdur-Rahman al-Madani ﵀, who died in 169 AH. Nafi’ ﵀ descended in his isnad from a long series of Medinan teachers who in turn reached back to Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁ and Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, and thereby to the Prophet ﷺ. His recitation was further transmitted by two renowned student-rawis, Warsh ﵀ and Qalun ﵀, and is today, especially in the Maghreb and in West Africa, the most widespread recitation tradition. In Mecca he chose Ibn Kathir al-Makki ﵀, who died in 120 AH, a descendant of Persian ancestors who had grown up in Mecca and whose recitation went back, through Mujahid ibn Jabr ﵀, ultimately to Ibn Abbas ﵁ and Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁. This Ibn Kathir ﵀ must not be confused with the tafsir scholar of a much later century who bears the same name; they are two different persons, in two different disciplines, with two different honorific traditions within scholarship.

In Basra he chose Abu 'Amr al-Basri ﵀, who died in 154 AH. Abu ‘Amr’s broad isnad tradition ran, besides through more than a hundred and eighty individual teachers whose names are registered in the qira’at literature, in a central line through Nasr ibn Asim ﵀, the same Basran scholar whom we met at al-Hajjaj’s regional Mushafs as one of the Iraqi qurra’ from Al-Hajjaj’s own time, and through his teachers back to Uthman ﵁ and Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁. The continuity between the first century and the canon of Ibn Mujahid ﵀ is in this link concretely demonstrable. Whoever read at al-Hajjaj’s regional Mushafs how Nasr ibn Asim ﵀ worked in Al-Hajjaj’s workshop on the i’jam system without ever reporting a deviant reading meets him here again, as a node in the chain from which one of the seven canonical qira’at would come forth.

In Damascus he chose Ibn 'Amir ash-Shami ﵀, who died in 118 AH. Ibn 'Amir ﵀'s isnad is particularly short and therefore all the more weighty. He had received his recitation from al-Mughirah ibn Abi Shihab al-Makhzumi ﵁, and al-Mughirah ﵁ had received his, in a direct oral transmission, from Uthman ﵁ himself. At the Mushaf that traveled to the five cities we saw how in 25 AH al-Mughirah ﵁ traveled as the designated reader with the Uthmanic Mushaf dispatch to Sham, in order to be able to test the local recitation in Damascus against the sent reference copy. What was a first link there proves here to be a lasting one. The Damascus recitation of Ibn 'Amir ﵀, which was included among the seven in 324 AH, goes back in only two intermediate links to the hand that in 25 AH had had the Quran verified in five capitals at once. The chain is measurably short and historically complete.

In Kufa he chose three qurra’. The first was Asim al-Kufi ﵀, who died in 127 AH, that is, Asim ibn Abi an-Najud ﵀. Asim’s isnad is perhaps the broadest in the entire qira’at tradition. He received his recitation from Abu Abdur-Rahman as-Sulami ﵀, and about this link Al-Azami is explicit: as-Sulami ﵀ was the most respected student of Ali ﵁, and the recitation that ran along this chain agreed with the Uthmanic Mushaf down to the detail of a single verse. Around that core link the classical qira’at literature draws a broader fan: as-Sulami ﵀ had recited not only for Ali ﵁ but also for Uthman ﵁, Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁, and Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, while an additional Kufan line reached back through Zarr ibn Hubaysh ﵀ to Ibn Mas’ud ﵁. Four Companion-sources for one isnad, with as-Sulami ﵀ as the collective conduit. Asim ﵀'s recitation was fixed in two canonical rawi transmissions, one by Hafs ibn Sulayman ﵀ and one by Shu’ba ibn 'Ayyash ﵀, and it is this Hafs ﵀ 'an Asim ﵀ that today represents the overwhelming majority of all printed Mushafs in the world. Whoever opens a present-day Quran in Indonesia, in Egypt, in Turkey, or in the Netherlands reads in nine of ten cases the Kufan recitation of Asim ﵀, received through as-Sulami ﵀, pronounced in the voice of Hafs ﵀.

The second Kufan qari’ was Hamza al-Kufi ﵀, who died in 156 AH, that is, Hamza ibn Habib az-Zayyat ﵀. His recitation was known for a number of specific phonetic characteristics, especially in the treatment of the hamza and in a more pronounced imala, the tilting of certain fatha vowels toward a kasra-like sound. His isnad ran through Sulayman al-A’mash ﵀ and Yahya ibn Wathab ﵀ on to Zarr ibn Hubaysh ﵀, and so to Ibn Mas’ud ﵁. The Kufan continuity with Ibn Mas’ud ﵁ is thereby present as an isnad layer in two of the three Kufan qira’at, not as a textual deviation but as a pronunciation tradition within the Uthmanic skeleton.

The third Kufan qari’ was Al-Kisa’i ﵀, who died in 189 AH, that is, Ali ibn Hamza al-Kisa’i ﵀, one of the greatest grammarians of Arabic in the second century AH. He was the teacher of two Abbasid caliphs in their youth, and he combined a thorough grammatical scholarship with his own recitation school that descended in the main from Hamza ﵀'s line, with its own accents on a number of specific verses. His recitation was in later centuries transmitted especially by the rawis Ad-Duri ﵀ and Abu al-Harith ﵀. Al-Kisa’i ﵀‘s presence among the seven illustrates that a qari’ was not exclusively an oral teacher: he could, as in this case, at the same time be a philologist of the first rank who had laid down in his grammatical works the rules of the Arabic language on which his own recitation was based.

Seven teachers, in five cities, in a chain that without exception goes back to one or more Companions ﵃, and through them to the Prophet ﷺ. That is the structure out of which Ibn Mujahid ﵀ built his book in 324 AH.

The nature of an isnad in the qira’at

An isnad in the qira’at science is something other than an isnad in the hadith science. In the hadith the isnad connects a narrator with the words of the Prophet ﷺ; one rarely hears the chain spoken, one reads it at the top of the hadith. In the qira’at the isnad is itself an acoustic phenomenon. A student who receives his recitation from his teacher takes over not only words, he takes over sounds: the exact pronunciation of the hamza, the duration of the madd, the place where the voice is pressed down or lifted up, the slight difference between an open and a restrained fatha. What he receives is an audible imprint of the voice of his teacher, which in turn was an audible imprint of the voice of his teacher’s teacher, and so back. A qira’at isnad is, in the most literal sense, a chain of voices.

This explains why the transmission could be so meticulous. A narrator who transmits a hadith can work within margins of synonymy and paraphrase; he need not cite word for word, phonetically correct. A reciter who transmits a qira’at can afford no synonymy and no paraphrase. A slight deviation of the sound would immediately be a deviation from the chain, and his students would in turn be connected to a deviant chain. The system thereby has a built-in correction mechanism: every deviation is audible, every deviation is traceable, every deviation has a name.

We must single out here one detail that in the broader literature sometimes remains underexposed. A qari’ did not have one isnad. He had many at once. Asim al-Kufi ﵀ had his principal line through as-Sulami ﵀, with in addition a second line through Zarr ibn Hubaysh ﵀ to Ibn Mas’ud ﵁. Abu 'Amr al-Basri ﵀ had, according to later registers, more than a hundred and eighty individual teachers from whom he had received parts of his recitation. An isnad chain was not a single line but a network of lines, all of which converged on the same place: the pronunciation that in the mosque of Medina, in the years of the Prophetic period, had been taught by the Prophet ﷺ to his Companions ﵃. The convergence of a network on one point is a stronger proof than the continuity of one line, for the network shows at every link that the outcome does not depend on that one link.

The codification of Ibn Mujahid ﵀

Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn Musa ibn Mujahid ﵀ was born in Baghdad in 245 AH, in the heart of the Abbasid metropolis, and spent the greater part of his life as a respected qari’ in the same city. He died in 324 AH. In his last active years he compiled his Kitab as-Sab’a fi al-Qira’at, the book that gathered the seven qira’at in one place and laid down the criteria for their canonization status. That book became the standard work to which every later qari’, to this day, oriented himself.

Why seven, and not six or eight or twelve. The question was never formulated by Ibn Mujahid ﵀ himself as a metaphysical choice. He stood, in 324 AH, before a practical problem. In the mosques of Baghdad, in the schools of Kufa and Basra, and in the study circles of Damascus and Medina, dozens of recitation traditions circulated, some with strong isnad chains, others with weaker transmission, a number with sporadic deviations that went outside the Uthmanic skeleton. The ordinary believer had no instrument to distinguish the certain from the less certain in this field. What Ibn Mujahid ﵀ did was not to restrict the revelation. The valid field was broader than the seven that he would select, and he knew that; the later codifiers would recognize still further authentic traditions within that same field, up to the ten of Ibn al-Jazari ﵀. What Ibn Mujahid ﵀ did was to delimit from that broader field a workable canon in which every included recitation met three criteria.

The first criterion was the isnad. Every included recitation had to possess a documented, tested chain of teachers that reached back without interruption to a Companion ﵁ and thereby to the Prophet ﷺ. Recitations with a broken chain or a disputed intermediate link were not included. The second criterion was agreement with the Uthmanic skeleton. A recitation that confirmed the skeleton, even if only in one of the possible readings that the skeleton allowed and within the margins that the i’jam and vowel points kept open, was accepted; a recitation that went outside the skeleton was, however authentic in other respects, not included as a canonical qira’at. The third criterion was agreement with the Arabic language. A reading had to conform to the grammatical rules of classical Arabic, even where it followed a less common but nonetheless valid construction; a pronunciation that did violence to the rules of the language could not be a canonical qira’at. That it was precisely Al-Kisa’i ﵀, one of the greatest grammarians of his century, who was found among the seven is in this light no coincidence: the third criterion and the figure of the qari’-philologist meet in the same person.

Under these three criteria, Nafi’ ﵀, Ibn Kathir ﵀, Abu 'Amr ﵀, Ibn 'Amir ﵀, Asim ﵀, Hamza ﵀, and Al-Kisa’i ﵀ came to the fore as the workable canon. That they became seven and not six or eight was an outcome of this examination, not a predetermined choice. When Ibn al-Jazari ﵀, a great qira’at codifier of the ninth century AH, published his an-Nashr fi al-Qira’at al-'Ashr in 833 AH, he added three to the seven of Ibn Mujahid ﵀: Abu Ja’far al-Madani ﵀, Ya’qub al-Hadrami ﵀, and Khalaf al-Bazzar ﵀. These three had in 324 AH as much right to inclusion as the seven, but Ibn Mujahid ﵀ had not been able to place them within his workable limit of seven. With Ibn al-Jazari ﵀'s addition they became ten, and with that the canon is completed. What is treated in this article is exclusively the first layer of seven, because it accomplished the codification act in 324 AH.

Ibn Mujahid ﵀ counted, for the whole Quran in its entirety, about a thousand places with multiple readings, most of them the places where the seven qira’at vary among themselves. About a thousand places in a text of more than 77 thousand words, in seven simultaneous recitation traditions, with every deviation documented, traceable, and held in its place within the skeleton. That is, in numerical terms, the breadth of the canonized diversity, and it is more modest than the polemical presentation sometimes wishes to suggest.

The rawi layer beneath the qari’

Beneath every qari’ stands a second layer of standardized transmission, that of the rawis. A rawi is a student who has fixed the recitation of his qari’ in a version recognized by the school itself, and who has passed this version on to his own students. Each of the seven qurra’ possesses, in the canonical register, at least two rawi transmissions, so that there are in fact fourteen documented subvariants within the seven qira’at.

For Nafi’ al-Madani ﵀ the two rawis are Warsh ﵀ (Uthman ibn Sa’id ﵀, d. 197 AH, Egypt) and Qalun ﵀ (Isa ibn Mina ﵀, d. 220 AH, Medina). Warsh ﵀'s transmission has a special position in the Maghreb and West Africa; in Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, and Senegal, extending into Mali, Niger, and Nigeria, the Quran recited in the mosque is in nine of ten cases Warsh ﵀ ‘an Nafi’ ﵀.

For Ibn Kathir al-Makki ﵀ the rawis are Al-Bazzi ﵀ and Qunbul ﵀. For Abu 'Amr al-Basri ﵀ they are Ad-Duri ﵀ and As-Susi ﵀, of whom Ad-Duri ﵀ is used to this day in parts of Sudan and the Horn of Africa. For Ibn 'Amir ash-Shami ﵀ they are Hisham ibn Ammar ﵀ and Ibn Dhakwan ﵀, both Damascene teachers. For Asim al-Kufi ﵀ the rawis are Hafs ibn Sulayman ﵀ (d. 180 AH) and Shu’ba ibn 'Ayyash ﵀ (d. 193 AH). This last is none other than the same Abu Bakr ibn 'Ayyash ﵀ whose learning process under Asim ﵀, at the pace of five verses per day, we already mentioned above. Hafs ﵀'s transmission is, as noted, the most widespread recitation worldwide. For Hamza al-Kufi ﵀ the rawis are Khalaf ﵀ and Khallad ﵀; for Al-Kisa’i ﵀ they are Abu al-Harith ﵀ and Ad-Duri ﵀, whereby Ad-Duri ﵀ appears in two independent rawi functions, because he had received separate recitations from both teachers.

Fourteen rawi transmissions beneath seven qari’ traditions. For whoever follows the structure, this yields a beautifully clear picture of an oral science that was made registrable, down to its finest ramifications, through written administration. What an ordinary believer heard in his mosque as one Quran was at the same time the bearer of a manifold, documented chain in which every link carried a name, a date, and a city.

What the qira’at are not

An article about the seven qira’at would be incomplete without an explicit negative definition. What the qira’at are not is of importance on several fronts, because it is precisely on these fronts that the polemical readings of the Quran’s textual history try to find their ground.

The qira’at are, first, not different Qurans. This must be said as clearly as possible. Each of the seven recitations reads from the same Uthmanic skeleton, in exactly the same places, in the same order of Surahs and verses, with the same semantic content. The differences between the seven lie in vocalizations, in phonetic nuances, in a handful of places where the consonant order, within what the i’jam system permits, can be read in two equivalent ways, and in a still smaller number of places where an entire word has a synonym recognized differently by all seven. None of these differences alters the message of the verse in its theological, juridical, or narrative content. A reader who pronounces Surah al-Fatiha verse 4 in the Hafs ﵀ transmission as malik yawm ad-din, Owner of the Day of Judgment, and a reader who pronounces the same verse in the Warsh ﵀ transmission as malik yawm ad-din, King of the Day of Judgment, both recite the same Quran, both with a recitation authorized by the Prophet ﷺ, and both with a meaning that lies within the broader meaning-enclosure of the verse.

The qira’at are, second, not free variations. A reciter has no freedom to compose a reading himself, to place points differently to his own taste, to adjust a pronunciation according to his grammatical preference. He is bound to the exact recitation of his qari’, which in turn is bound to its isnad. The grammarian Ibn Shanbudh ﵀, who died in 328 AH, had wanted, in departure from the seven qira’at, to introduce his own grammatically defensible readings into the public recitation, and the scholars held firm unyieldingly and refused his innovation. The classical qira’at literature also reports a formal court case in Baghdad in which he was forced to recant; with that, it became visible, in court and in the study circle at once, how sharply the umma guarded the boundary between the canonized recitation and personal invention. A scholar was free to work out his grammatical opinions in his books; in the Mushaf reading he was bound to the sunna.

The qira’at are, third, not identical to the seven ahruf whose concept we treated earlier. The difference between ahruf and qira’at is, despite the identical numbering of seven, the heart of the matter. The ahruf are the breadth of the revelation as given in the Prophetic period, the seven dialect or recitation modalities in which Jibril ﵇ had revealed the Quran to the Prophet ﷺ according to the hadith in the transmission of Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁. The qira’at are a much later selection, codified from 324 AH onward, within the Uthmanic skeleton that had been fixed in 25 AH under Uthman ﵁, and thereby not the full ahruf breadth but the workable canon within it. A comparison is perhaps illuminating. The ahruf are the space of possibility given by the revelation; the qira’at are the selection within that space canonized by the umma in the generations thereafter. The ahruf are broader than the qira’at. The Uthmanic skeleton itself is, as Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ and his commission carried it out, one written ahruf with the possibility of bearing several recitations at once within its i’jam-less space. The qira’at fill that space with the codified, isnad-validated recitations.

We encounter on these three negative definitions one concrete example that recurs in Al-Azami’s treatment as an anchor point. Surah al-A’raf verse 146 contains a word that is read in two qira’at as rushd and in other qira’at as rashad. Lexicographically both forms are valid Arabic words with the same semantic charge, the right way. The two readings do not alter the verse in its meaning; they give it in two mutually complementary formulations, both justified by isnad chain, both within the Uthmanic skeleton that in this place holds no vowel mark and thus permits both readings fittingly.

One Quranic verse, two equivalent voices

One concrete place shows what all these structural characteristics mean in recited practice. The opening Surah al-Fatiha, in its fourth verse, is pronounced by the seven qira’at in two mutually equivalent ways. In the Hafs ﵀ 'an Asim ﵀ transmission, the most widespread recitation worldwide and the text of most printed Mushafs, it reads with a long alif after the mim, malik, Owner. In the Warsh ﵀ ‘an Nafi’ ﵀ transmission, current in the Maghreb and West Africa, it reads without that long alif, malik, King. The Uthmanic skeleton, as it was fixed in 25 AH, writes in this place only the consonants mlk, without materializing the alif, and thereby bears both pronunciations at once.

Both pronunciations are connected to the Prophet ﷺ by isnad chain. Both fall within the skeleton that Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ had written in 25 AH. Both are recognized as valid by all qari’ schools. The difference between Owner and King has never been treated in the tafsir tradition as an opposition, but as a pair that only jointly pronounces the full theological meaning. Allah ﷻ is both the Owner and the King of the Day of Judgment, and it is fitting that the opening Surah, in two simultaneous recitation transmissions, pronounces both presences.

This is what the seven qira’at make visible in their codified diversity. Not two Qurans, but one Quran in two voices taught by the same Prophet ﷺ, borne by two isnad chains tested by the same science, fixed within the same skeleton written by the same Sahaba ﵃.

What this means for the textual history

The two-layer preservation that has been worked out in this entire theme receives, in the seven canonical qira’at, its formal sealing. The first layer, the written skeleton, had been fixed in 25 AH under Uthman ﵁, extended across many cities in 84 AH under Al-Hajjaj, confirmed in paleographic history by Sana’a, Topkapi, Tashkent, and the Birmingham folios. The second layer, the oral isnad chain, was present in every generation from the revelation itself, and was summarized in 324 AH under Ibn Mujahid ﵀ into a formal canon of seven, with beneath it a doubling into fourteen standardized rawi transmissions.

What no other religious text-corpus in history possesses is precisely this structure. A written text always exists on its own, in all cultures, in a handful of manuscript traditions that partly correct one another and partly diverge. What the Quran has in addition is an oral isnad chain that runs alongside the written tradition and checks it against itself in every generation. What the Hebrew Bible has worked out as the Masoretic tradition, and what the New Testament knows in its multiple text families, are entirely differently structured transmission systems, in which the oral control is in the main absent or is set up only centuries after the written fixation. The Quran has borne the two layers together from the revelation itself, in an unbroken chain from teacher to student in which every link carries a documented name.

There is a second observation that flows from the seven qira’at. The diversity within the skeleton is, other than one might initially think, not a weakness of the preservation but a confirmation of it. A text that is recited by seven independent recitation schools, and that in all those seven schools is pronounced entirely identically on the overwhelming majority of its words, with in the order of magnitude of about a thousand places where multiple readings exist, offers a stronger guarantee against textual drift than a text that is passed on by one school without possibility of comparison. For every deviation outside those codified multiple readings would immediately have come to light upon comparison. The seven schools were each other’s mutual control mechanism, and the fact that they agree completely over the overwhelming majority of the text is the audible working out of that control.

A third observation touches the polemical literature. At al-Hajjaj’s regional Mushafs we saw how Goldziher, Mingana, and the orientalists following them claimed, on the ground of as-Sayyari’s list, that Al-Hajjaj had allegedly altered the Uthmanic text in eleven words, and how this accusation proved structurally impossible on four different fronts. Against the background of the seven qira’at, that refutation receives its full weight. A textual alteration in eleven words, in the first century AH, in an operation without a control mechanism, would in the second and third centuries AH have come to light in the seven independent recitation schools, for all these schools measure themselves against one another. They have withheld, in the codified thousand places of difference, not a single deviation caused by Al-Hajjaj. What they do retain are the natural differences that emerged from the ahruf breadth as given in the Prophetic period. The difference between a natural ahruf widening and an administrative textual alteration is in this examination plain and clear.

The ordinary believer who today opens a Mushaf usually does this without realizing what knowledge lies beneath his fingers. He reads in nine of ten cases the Hafs ﵀ 'an Asim ﵀ recitation, which reaches back through as-Sulami ﵀ to Uthman ﵁, Ali ﵁, Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁, and Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, and thereby to the Prophet ﷺ. Whoever opens one in Morocco reads in the same majority Warsh ﵀ ‘an Nafi’ ﵀, with an equally unbroken chain to Medina and Mecca. The two readers recite one Quran, in two voices taught by the same Prophet ﷺ, with two documented chains, within one written skeleton.

From the mouth to the parchment

With the codification of Ibn Mujahid ﵀ in 324 AH, the oral side of the transmission receives its formal sealing. The pronunciation, which from the first revelation had been passed on in every generation from teacher to student and in every tested chain reached back to the Sahaba ﵃ and the Prophet ﷺ, was now registered, tested, and fixed in seven canonical qurra’ and fourteen rawi transmissions. The diversity within the skeleton had thereby been made visible and documented, and the control among the schools was assured by their simultaneous functioning in many capitals.

What stands alongside the recitation tradition in this preservation is the written skeleton itself, which was fixed in 25 AH under Uthman ﵁ and extended across many cities in 84 AH under Al-Hajjaj. That written side has its own witnesses, and they are witnesses of an entirely different kind than the isnad chain. They lie not in the mouth but in ink, not in the voice of a living reciter but on parchment that has survived the centuries. Where the qira’at chain is audible and lets itself be tested in every recitation, the parchment lets itself be measured: it can be dated, photographed, read layer by layer, and laid against the present-day Mushaf.

The following articles of this sub-map therefore leave the recitation tradition and turn to those physical witnesses. But before the parchment is given the word, the attack that orientalism opened upon it in the twentieth century must first be refuted. For it is precisely around the oldest manuscripts that the idea of an “other Quran” has been raised, a text that would differ from the text we have here followed in the mouth. The very next article therefore takes under the lens the two manuscripts with which Mingana and Puin tried to show that “other Quran”, and shows how that supposed deviation dissolves as soon as one reads the material itself with care. Only when that refutation stands can the parchment speak as it truly speaks: as a witness for the text that the oral chain has preserved, not against it.