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Marijn
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27 Oct, 4 tweets, 2 min read
The first word of Q36:30 is read by all canonical readers as yā-ḥasratan 'O woe!' And this is also the reading we find in the main (red) reading in Arabe 352h, however in blue a different reading is marked, a non-canonical reading that doesn't follow the rasm. Image
A little blue yāʾ has been added to the tāʾ marbūṭah and a kasrah stands below it, marking يا حسرتى yā-ḥasrat-ē "O my woe!" This expression occurs elsewhere in the Quran with the spelling with a yāʾ, with the special vocative 1sg. ending -ā/-ē "my".
quran.com/39/56 Image
Alternatively it could also simply be read as yā-ḥasrat-ī with the normal 1sg. possessive, and both forms are indeed reported as possible reading by ʾAbū Ḥayyān in his monumental al-Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ.

You can check out the manuscript in more detail here:
gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv… Image
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More from @PhDniX

Marijn
13 Nov
One of the features of the Quran is that certain words with no obvious rhyme or reason will occur in two different pronunciations even when the formula is essentially identical from one to the other.

This is most notable between Q18:78 and 82.

How to understand this? Thread 🧵 Image
The end of the verse is identical save for the first occurrence having the long form of tastaṭiʿ and the second having the short form tasṭiʿ.

Of course you can come up with endless completely ad hoc case-by-case explanations, but these bring us no closer to *understanding* it.
There are many cases just like this. Q6:42 and Q7:94 are formulaically parallel, yet one has yataḍarraʿūna whereas the other has yaḍḍarraʿūna.

quran.com/6/42
quran.com/7/94

Case-by-case explanations fail to explain the larger pattern that is clearly there. Image
Read 13 tweets
Marijn
27 Oct
@AlCabbage045 @SWANA_Heat @azforeman Sure, Classical Arabic was a thing way before colonialism. But I do think you can make a case that expectations of modernism clashing with the existing diglossia have massively exacerbated the problem.

In the Middle Ages Classical Arabic was for a specific learned class.
@AlCabbage045 @SWANA_Heat @azforeman And that didn't even necessarily include all those who were literate. There why "Middle Arabic" as "the stage between old and new arabic" and "the stage between low and high arabic" get mixed up. In the middle ages non-use of Classical Arabic in writing was somehow more typical.
@AlCabbage045 @SWANA_Heat @azforeman As nationalism as a concept developed, and the idea of a monolithic 'standard language', which due to the sociolinguistics couldn't be anything but the language that up until then was reserved for the highest of the highest worldwide religious elite, really made things difficult.
Read 4 tweets
Marijn
22 Oct
I've been reading through the long-awaited new book by Shady Nasser "The Second Canonization of the Qurʾān".

There is a lot of marginal transmissions of readings that surprised me, but Šuʿbah reporting he read baʾīs as bayʾas before changing his mind is probably the coolest. 🧵 Image
baʾīs "wretched" is a typical adjectival formation from baʾisa "to be miserable, wretched", whereas bayʾas is rather unusual as an adjective formation, Arabic lexicons also report this adjective as bayʾis which I expect is the more probable reading here too. ImageImage
Ibn Mujāhid brings a report of Šuʿbah saying: "I memorized it on the authority of ʿĀṣim as bayʾ[a/i]sin, in the pattern fayʿ[a/i]l, but then I started to doubt it, so I dropped the transmission of ʿĀṣim and adopted baʾīs on the authority of al-ʾAʿmaš instead. Image
Read 15 tweets
Marijn
18 Oct
Leafing through al-Zamaḫšarī's al-Mufaṣṣal fī al-Naḥw today, I ran into his chapter on ʾibdāl "replacement", namely his section on the replacement with tāʾ of the consonants wāw, yāʾ, sīn, ṣād and bāʾ. This leads to interesting reflections on Arabic grammatical theory. 🧵
Most of Arabic morpho-phonological theory deals with a concept known as ʾaṣl "root, origin", which is an abstract underlying representation of a word. It has similarities both to a phonemic underlying form, and etymological origin, but is neither exactly.
Rather, it is more of a Platonic ideal representation of an underlying form. The 'source' form from which the surface form (or forms) can be derived through a set of rational rules (ideally). For example, the ʾaṣl of the verb qāla 'he said' is {QaWaLa}.
Read 16 tweets
Marijn
12 Oct
In January -- corona volente -- I will be joining @the_IAS in Princeton for half a year. I'm very excited to join the people there.

While there I will be looking at the reading tradition of a specific group of manuscripts in the B.II style.

ias.edu/scholars/marij…
The B.II style is one of the classical Kufic styles, frequently used in a somewhat miniature hand on small folios (usually around 15x21cm) with about 16 lines to the page. The dated copies that we have generally date from the 3rd century AH.

They have striking commonalities: Image
When examining the regional variants of the rasm of such variants a striking pattern emerges: Many, if not all, manuscripts in this style have Basran variants (as we will see in a forthcoming article by @therealsidky). This might suggest a common center of production.
Read 12 tweets
Marijn
28 Sep
Great conversation between @dbru1 and Asma Hilali about quranic manuscripts but to me one detail remained a bit vague, it is addressed in the title: "Did the Quran exist early as a book?"

The answer to this should, unequivocally be: Yes. Yes it did.

Thread 🧵
One of the questions posed in the conversation is "where is Uthman's codex?" and "where are the regional codices?"

We might actually have them, but the fragments we have simply do not come with labels.

But even if we didn't this does not mean they aren't CERTAINLY a reality.
We do not own the autograph of Sībawayh's al-Kitāb, are we to assume al-Kitāb never existed and Sībawayh did not write it? Of course not. And this is true for the vast majority of the Classical Arabic literature (or any literature in manuscript traditions).
Read 16 tweets

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