So red it can't be ʾAbū Jaʿfar. (ʾAbū ʿAmr and Nāfiʿ left).
Black could still be anyone but Ibn ʿĀmir, ʾAbū Jaʿfar Nāfiʿ andʾAbū ʿAmr.
Q18:85
red: fa-ttabaʿa (majority), fa-ʾatbaʿa (ʿĀṣim, Ḥamzah, al-Kisāʾī, Ḫalaf and ibn ʿĀmir)
Black: might be fa-ʾatbaʿa, a bit unclear. If so the reading is Kufan.
Q18:86
Here the black text clearly follows ḥāmiyatin... but the red vocalisation appears to hamzah, which is only consistent with ḥamiʾatin, which does not help us narrow it down. That's the reading of Nāfiʿ, ibn Kaṯīr, ʾAbū ʿAmr, Yaʿqūb and Ḥafṣ.
Black is starting to look clearly Kufan. Red might still be Nāfiʿ or ʾAbū ʿAmr (I'm quite sure it's gonna be ʾAbū ʿAmr).
Q18:93
Red & Black: bayna s-saddayni: reading of Ibn Kaṯīr, ʾAbū ʿAmr, and Ḥafṣ. The rest reads s-suddayni.
Therefore:
Red = ʾAbū ʿAmr
Black = Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim
The fact the two vocalisations represent different readings is yet another argument they are not contemporary.
Anyone who can read the Persian: it would be cool if we could figure out which of the two readings the Persian commentary had in mind and whether it aligns with either the red or the black vocalisation!
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Seeing how al-Dānī works his way through competing reports for certain readings is really interesting. There is often a conflict between what he gets from books and oral tradition. Oral tradition does not always win out (though it often does).
Let's look at Q38:46 🧵
al-Dānī starts: "Nāfiʿ and the transmission of Hišām [from Ibn ʿĀmir] in my recitation [to my teachers] read "bi-ḫāliṣati ḏikrā d-dār" (Q38:46) without tanwīn as a construct phrase; the rest read "bi-ḫāliṣatin" with Tanwīn."
However, Muḥammad b. ʿAlī from Ibn Muǧāhid said that Nāfiʿ only removes the nūn.
This is a citation from ibn Muǧāhid's kitāb al-sabʿah, which al-Dānī receives through Muḥammad b. ʿAlī.
And indeed Ibn Muǧāhid does not mention Hišām ʿan Ibn ʿĀmir but only Nāfiʿ!
My current project is collecting a database of vocalised Quranic manuscripts, to study which reading traditions they reflect. A large number (likely the majority) do not represent any known reading traditions from the literary tradition. A thread on one such a reading type. 🧵
When a manuscript has an unknown non-canonical reading, it is typically unique to that manuscript: not a single manuscript is exactly alike. Nevertheless, we do find real 'patterns' among groups of manuscripts, that do things in similar ways that are distinct from known readings.
For example, a large number of manuscripts in the B.II style have an unusual pronominal system where the plural pronouns are long (humū, ʾantumū etc.) and the third person singular suffix -hū never harmonizes (bi-raḥmatihū, fīhu, ʿalayhu), *except* with the preposition bihī.
This article examines a famous passage in the Hadith that related the canonization of the Quran, where the Uthmanic committee has a disagreement on how to write the word for "Ark".
Insight into loan strategies elucidates the passage.
In the Quran today the Ark of the Covenant is spelled التابوت and pronounced al-tābūt. This is a loanword from the Aramaic tēḇōṯ-ā, likely via Gəʿəz tābōt.
However, reports (which go back to Ibn Šihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/741-2)) tell us there was a controversy on how to spell it.
The Medinan Zayd b. Ṯābit wanted to spell it with a final hāʾ: التابوه, while his Quraši colleagues insisted it should be spelled التابوت.
They take it up with ʿUṯmān who says: the Quran was revealed in the Quraysh dialect, so it should be written according to it.
Ibn al-Bawwāb's quran, following the Classical Arabic orthography (rather than the rasm), spells ʾalif maqṣūrah before suffixes with ʾalif rather than (the Uthmanic) yāʾ. However, sometimes it does not, e.g. in Q79 here: مرساها, تخشاها, ضحاها, BUT: ذكريها. What gives? 🧵
Turns out there is a beautiful perfectly regular distribution!
The Ibn al-Bawwāb Quran is written according to the transmission of al-Dūrī from the reading of ʾAbū ʿAmr.
ʾAbū ʿAmr treats such ʾalifāt maqṣūrah is a special way. He reads them as /ā/ most of the time...
But he reads with ʾimālah, i.e. /ē/ whenever a /r/ precedes.
When the word stands in rhyme position, the /ā/ of such words is pronounced bayna lafẓay, i.e. /ǟ/.
And this distribution explains the spelling in the screenshot above, and throughout this manuscript!
If you look in a printed muṣḥaf today, and you're familiar with modern Arabic orthography, you will immediately be struck that many of the word are spelled rather strangely, and not in line with the modern norms.
This is both an ancient and a very modern phenomenon. 🧵
On the two page spread in the previous post alone there are 25 (if I didn't miss any) words that are not spelled the way we would "expect" them to.
The reason for this is because modern print editions today try to follow the Uthmanic rasm.
During the third caliph Uthman's reign, in the middle of the 7th century, he established an official standard of the text. This text was written in the spelling norms of the time. This spelling is called the rasm.
But since that time the orthographic norms of Arabic changed.
As some of you may know, I don't have a particularly high opinion of Arabic101, but now he's wading into the manuscript fray...
Will be live-tweeting facepalms as I go through it.
0:14 "what you see is 100% identical today to any Muṣḥaf".
Minor gripe. It's identical to the Madani Muṣḥaf, but not really to the Kufan, Basran or Damascene. But still 99.9% so this is really nitpicky.
0:43 "Re-phrased Ayat/Removed words/Added words" is of course anachronistic. It implies that the text we have today is more original than the Sanaa Palimpsest. Not much to suggest that.