Thread by @PhDniX

When the 3rd caliph ʿUṯmān b. ʿAffān tasked the committee led by Zayd b. Ṯābit to write the official Mushaf, he is said to have told them "write it in the language of the Quraysh, for it has been revealed in their tongue." This seems incompatible with the canonical readings. 🧵

While today there are 10 accepted canonical readings, with 2 transmissions each which can differ quite significantly in their linguistic details, not a single one of them agrees with the universally agreed upon linguistic features of Hijazi (or more specifically Qurashi) Arabic.

There is consensus on the fact that the Quraysh did not have vowel harmony of the third person masculine suffixes -hū and -hum.
Farrāʾ (d. 209) reports Quraỵš/Hijazis say: ʿalayhum, ʿalayhumā, ʿalayhunna, ʿalayhu, fīhu, bihū, while Najdis say ʿalayhim, -himā, -hinna, -hi, -hī.

While there is a good deal of variation among the canonical readings on the treatment of these pronouns, the majority agree with the Najdi system, with occasional exceptions. Ḥamzah uses the Hijazi form ONLY for ʿalayhum, ʾilayhum and ladayhum.

None have the Qurashi system.

Another feature broadly held to be a Qurashi feature is the complete loss of the hamzah. This is for example uncontroversial to Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276 AH) who says: The Qurashi does not apply the hamzah.

However, all reading traditions do have the hamzah!

While some of the readers are more prone to drop the hamzah than others (especially ʾAbū Ǧaʿfar, Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ and ʾAbūʿAmr drop it a lot), not a single one of the readings is completely devoid of the hamzah. As a result: not a single reading is the dialect of Quraysh.

So how do we resolve this apparent paradox? Western scholars outright rejected the report from ʿUṯmān, and instead affirmed that the Quran was not composed in the dialect of Quraysh but in the language of poetry, a claim that has never actually been demonstrated.

This is a pseudo-solution. It has never been shown that the language of Poetry and the Quran are identical, and I don't see it.

Rejecting the report from a Muslim perspective is difficult, as the report is considered ṣaḥīḥ and shows up in al-Bukhari.
sunnah.com/bukhari/66/9

The surprising thing, however, is that this apparent paradox doesn't appear to have been felt like one. The idea that the Quran was composed in the Qurashi dialect, is never recognised to conflict wit the fact that none of the readings of the Quran are Qurashi.

This is clear from the fact that al-Farrāʾ seems to have believed that the Quran was revealed (as Kahle found a manuscript where he cites this report), while at the same time reporting in his Luġāt al-Qurʾān forms that are not Qurashi and transmitting them from al-Kisāʾī.

Clearly, al-Farrāʾ, and with him many other early scholars, did not see the readings as being verbatim transcriptions of how the prophet would have recited it, and saw no issue with reading non-Quraish dialectal forms like bihī and ʿalayhim as long as it agreed with the rasm.

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