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Marijn
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4 Oct, 11 tweets, 4 min read
All canonical Quranic readers today read the second word of Q43:61 as la-ʿilmun: "And indeed, he will be knowledge of the Hour, so be not in doubt of it, and follow Me. This is a straight path".
But despite this canonical consensus, there is also a significant variant reading. 🧵 Image
Ibn Ḫālawayh tells us that the non-canonical reading la-ʿalamun "a sign [of the Hour]" was adhered to by a whole slew of famous companions of the prophet: ʾAbū Hurayrah, Ibn ʿAbbās, Qatādah, as well as the successor al-Ḍaḥḥāk.

viewer.cbl.ie/viewer/image/A… Image
From the literary evidence this reading appears to have been popular.
However, either because the reading lost popularity over la-ʿilmun, or just by the sheer coincidence of which readers were eventually canonised in the 10th century, this reading has disappeared in recitation.
However, if we turn to ancient vocalised Quranic manuscripts, ones that clearly predate Ibn Mujāhid's canonization of the seven readers, it is clear that this reading was indeed known, and utilized.

Let's look at some of the examples I've found.
Arabe 347 (a), has the now canonical reading la-ʿilmun as its main vocalisation (in red). But the companion reading la-ʿalamun is marked as a secondary reading in yellow.

gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv… Image
Arabe 333 (d), much in the same way as the previous manuscript marks the now canonical reading la-ʿilmun with its primary colour in red, and marks la-ʿalamun as a secondary colour in green.

gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv… Image
The 3rd example I found, is perhaps the most interesting though, Wetzstein II 1937, unambiguously marks la-ʿalamun as the only reading. Clearly in whatever reading this manuscript tries to represent, this was the default reading!

digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PP… Image
One should not forget that making manuscripts from parchment, with extremely well-executed calligraphy is expensive and takes great skill. The fact that such non-canonical readings show up in them, is not just sloppiness. These readings mattered and were worth writing down.
It's easy to take consensus of the canonical readers today and back-project it all the way back to the time of the prophet, simply dismissing reports to the contrary as simply mistaken.
Kufic manuscript give a direct look into the 'reading landscape' prior to canonization.
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More from @PhDniX

Marijn
29 Oct
Sūrat Maryam (Q19) is well-known among scholars of the Quran for having a highly conspicuous passage (quran.com/19/34-40) which must be an interpolation.
The question however is: when was this section interpolated into the Quran? Manuscript evidence can give us some hints.🧵
Many scholars as early as Nöldeke and as recent as Guillaume Dye have pointed to these verses as looking like a conspicuous interpolation. And indeed the section really stands out for several reasons:
1. The rhyme scheme of Maryam is:
1-33: -iyyā
34-40: -UM (ūn/īm/īn)
35-74: -iyyā
75-98: -dā

In other words our passage abruptly disrupts the consistent (and unique to this Sūrah) rhyme -iyyā.

This is atypical for the Quran and makes the section stand out.
Read 24 tweets
Marijn
21 Oct
This verse of the Sanaa palimpsest needed a bit more study rather than discuss on the spot. The variant in the Sanaa palimpsest at Q9:18 is interesting, but the context is important. This 'variant' when taken out of context looks spectacular, but it's clearly an error. 🧵 Image
To understand what is happening with the Sanaa lower text, we actually need to look at the context of Q9:18, and specifically the verse that follows Q9:19. Here's the standard text: As you can see the jāhada (not jihād!) fī sabīli llāhi actually occurs in the following verse. Image
The transcription in the video was technically correct, but it should be clear that all of the material that appears to replace the standard text, is actually material present right in the next verse. Image
Read 9 tweets
Marijn
19 Oct
The name of God in the Quran is Aḷḷāh, that much is clear. We also know that the Quran explicitly equates its God with the God the Christians and Jews follow. Today Arabic Christian and Jews alike will indeed call their God that. But where does this name come from? 🧵
It is frequently (and not unreasonably) assumed that Aḷḷāh is a contraction of the definite article al- "the" + ʾilāh "deity". And this is indeed likely its origin, but it is not without its problems. This loss of hamzah and kasrah (and addition of velarization) is irregular.
In Classical Arabic, the expected outcome of al-+ ʾilāh would simply be al-ʾilāh, not Aḷḷāh. So while its etymology might be "The God", the name does not mean "The God", just like "Peter" to an English speaker would not mean "stone".

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%80%CE…
Read 24 tweets
Marijn
18 Oct
While of course, the Quran is not talking about Soap, it would actually solve a vexing textual problem in Q5:69!

A short thread about the grammatical error of the Sabians. 🧵 Image
The verse starts with ʾinna llaḏīna ʾāmanū wa-llaḏīna hādū wa-ṣ-ṣāb(iʾ)ūna wa-n-naṣārā "Indeed, those who have believed, and those who were Jews or Sabians or Christians". The sentence is introduced with ʾinna "indeed", which should be followed by a noun in the accusative.
Thus, we would not expect wa-ṣ-ṣābiʾūna, but rather wa-ṣ-ṣābiʾīna.

(The joke here is, had we read it not as a nominative plural but as the noun aṣ-ṣābūna "the soap", it would be in the accusative and grammatical unproblematic! But this is just silly of course).
Read 17 tweets
Marijn
6 Sep
MS Or. 2251 at @theUL is yet another interesting copy of the Dalāʾil al-Ḫayrāt from the northern end of sub-saharan africa. It's fully vocalised, and as is typical of manuscripts from the region, it seems to have an actual recitation tradition associated.
cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-022… Image
First, it vocalises things in ways that we normally associate with copies of the Quran.
1. Yellow dots for hamzah (instead of hamzah sign)
2. Subtle use of doubled sign orientation to mark assimlation or non-assimilation of tanwīn. ImageImageImage
It also marks madd when across word boundaries. When a word ends in a long vowel, and the next starts with a hamzah, the vowel is made overlong. While the maddah sign is common in Classical Arabic mss, usually only word-internally.
ṣallā ḷḷāhu ʿalayhi wa-ʿalāā ʾālihī Image
Read 14 tweets
Marijn
28 Aug
Whenever one learns Classical Arabic, they are usually told that it has 6 vowels, three short ones: /a/, /i/, /u/, and their long counterparts: /ā/, /ī/, /ū/.

But many Quranic reading traditions have more than those, a short thread on the vowel systems of the seven readers. 🧵
Every single reader may have an overlong pronunciation of every single long vowel the reader has. These overlong vowels are phonetically conditioned and therefore non-phonemic. They occur:
1. Before hamza /ʔ/: [samāāʔ] /samāʔ/
2. In super heavy syllables: [dāābbah] /dābbah/
Ibn Kaṯīr simply what we would think of as the Classical Arabic vowel system. The only difference is it has the non-phonemic overlong vowels. But I've argued in a recent paper that that is actually a feature more broadly in Classical Arabic prose.

brill.com/view/journals/…
Read 14 tweets

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