In the reading of the reader al-ʾAʿmaš (d. 148) already on verse 5 of al-Fātiḥah he recites something that no canonical reader does: he reads nistaʿīnu rather than nAstaʿīnu.

This is what Sibṭ al-Ḫayyāṭ (d. 541), but this is absent in other descriptions, what's going on? 🧵 This is what Sibṭ al-Ḫayyāṭ says:
al-ʾAʿmaš recired in the path of al-Muṭṭawwaʿī "nistaʿīnu" with a kasrah on the first nūn, and it is likewise for the kasrah of the tāʾ in "tiʿlam", "tiʿṯaw", "tirkanū", "fa-timassakumu n-nāru" and what is like that.

To what extent was knowledge and transmission of the reading traditions dependent on written works and/or notebooks rather than the semi-oral process of reciting the Quran to a teacher?

In the transmission of Ibn Bakkār from Ibn ʿĀmir the written transmission is very clear. 🧵 The reading of the canonical Syrian reader Ibn ʿĀmir is not particularly well-transmitted. The two canonical transmitters Ibn Ḏakwān and Hišām are several generations removed from Ibn ʿĀmir, and Ibn Ḏakwān never had any students who recited the Quran to him.

An interesting interplay of orality and written transmission of the Quran that I recently ran into going through the Taysīr, at Q37:123 al-Dānī has a curious statement about the recitation of وان الياس... let's dive in! al-Dānī says: "Ibn Ḏakwān in my recitation to al-Fārisī from al-Naqqās (sic, Naqqāš) from al-ʾAḫfaš from him: wa-inna lyāsa with removal of the hamzah, and the rest read it with the hamzah (i.e. ʾilyāsa).
And this is what I recited for Ibn Ḏakwān i the path of the Syrians"

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."

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.

New Article!

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.

doi.org/10.1515/islam-… 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.

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...

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.

I'm about to start watching this.

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.

@BountyHunter255 I've got my facts right. Christian writing in Arabic called God Al-ʾilāh. For example this Christian inscription from Dumat al-Jandal.

And as Nehmé points out, this is common in a number of pre-Islamic Christian Arabic inscriptions.

…rlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/54…
@BountyHunter255 1. Ḥimà-Sud PalAr8
2. The Zabad Inscription
3. Now also the "Yazid the King" inscription.
4. Attempted at destroying both al-ʾilāh and the cross, but seemingly also in the FaQ5b () alsahra.org/2017/09/%D9%86…

In his 2020 book, Shady Nasser spends a chapter on a 'survival of the fittest' model of canonization of the reading traditions, arguing that over time the "majority transmission" tended to win out.

He choses a rather unusual example to illustrate this. 🧵 On page 25, Nasser tries to present an evolutionary model, with natural selection, by which some transmission paths of the seven readers become 'canonical', while others don't. One of these is that one "drops out" when diverging from the standard reading of the group...

Ibn Ḫālawayh's (d. 380) Kitāb al-Badīʿ is an interesting book on the Qirāʾāt because it's the earliest surviving work that tries to simplify the transmissions of the readings, and does it rather differently from what becomes popular, the system of Ibn Ġalbūn the father (d. 389) Ibn Ḫālawayh was Ibn Muǧāhid's student, who is widely held to be the canonizer of the seven reading traditions. Ibn Muǧāhid's book is the earliest book on the 7 reading traditions. But canon or not, Ibn Ḫālawayh's book actually describes 8 (adding Yaʿqūb).

NEW PUBLICATION: "Pronominal variation in Arabic among grammarians, Qurʾānic readings traditions and manuscripts".

This article has been in publication hell for 4 years. But it was an seminal work for my current research project, and a great collaboration with Hythem Sidky.
🧵 In this paper we try to describe the pronominal system used in early Islamic Classical Arabic. There is a striking amount of variation in this period, most of which does not survive into "standard classical Arabic".

In my book "Quranic Arabic" I argue that if you look closely at the Quranic rasm you can deduce that the text has been composed in Hijazi Arabic (and later classicized into more mixed forms in the reading traditions). Can we identify dialects in poetry?

https://twitter.com/Quranic_Islam/status/1781866855990235365

I think this is possible to some extent, yes. And so far this has really not been done at all. Most of the time people assume complete linguistic uniformity in the poetry, and don't really explore it further.
But there are a number of rather complex issues to contend with:

Last year I was asked to give a talk at the NISIS Autumn School about the textual history of the Quran. Here's a thread summarizing the points of that presentation. Specifically the presentation addresses some of Shoemaker's new objections on the Uthmanic canonization. Traditionally, the third caliph ʿUṯmān is believed to have standardized the text.

However, in critical scholarship of the '70s the historicity of this view came to be questioned.

How can we really be sure that what the tradition tells us is correct?

The canonical Kufan readers Ḥamzah and al-Kisāʾī read the word ʾumm "mother" or ʾummahāt "mothers" with a kasrah whenever -ī or -i precedes, e.g.:
Q43:4 fī ʾimmi l-kitābi
Q39:6/Q53:32 fī buṭūni ʾimma/ihātikum

This seems random, but there is a general pattern here! 🧵 This feature was explained al-Farrāʾ in a lengthy discussion at the start of his Maʿānī. This makes sense: al-Farrāʾ was al-Kisāʾī's student who in turn was Ḥamzah's. Surprisingly in "The Iconic Sībawayh" Brustad is under the misapprehension that this is not a canonical variant.

Those who have read my book on Quranic Arabic may have noticed that I translate The Arabic word luġah as "linguistic practice", rather than "dialect" which is how many people commonly translate it.

This is for good reason: among the Arab grammarians it did not mean dialect! 🧵 In Modern Standard Arabic, luġah basically just means "language", as can be seen, e.g. on the Arabic Wikipedia page on the Dutch Language which calls it al-luġah al-hūlandiyyah.

This modern use gets projected onto the early Arab grammarians like Sībawayh and al-Farrāʾ.

An interesting question: In Classical Arabic we know that there is full case inflection (rafʿ, naṣb, ǧarr) along with nunation (tanwīn). But these features get neutralized in pause (waqf = utterance final position).

Where does that come from? Not totally clear.

https://twitter.com/ArumNatzorkhang/status/1748744335036924119

Let's first start with the rules:
1. -an becomes -ā#
2. all other final short vowels with or without tanwīn are lost.
2a. also 3sg.m. -hū and -hī lose their final long vowels.
2b. long plural pronouns -humū also lose final long vowels.
3. The feminine ending -at shifts to -ah#

It's funny how in Semitic studies the a-insertion for segolate nouns, e.g. Hebrew mɛlɛḵ pl. məlåḵim < *malk pl. *malakīm is considers "one of the major distinguishing isoglosses of Northwest Semitic", while it's literally the regular rule for Arabic (which isn't NWS) as well. Huehnergard (2007) quoted above seems to be aware of cases like laʿnat- pl. laʿanāt but claims that they are "occasionally found and not mandatory". But this is, really not correct, certainly not for the feminine nouns, where if you add -āt the -a- insertion is mandatory.

A great irony of the whole "Muhammad is in the song of songs!" debacle, is that in basically all early sources that write vowels (Greek, Coptic, Sassanian, Syriac) but also in many modern languages (e.g. Turkish) his name appears to have been commonly been pronounced Maḥma/id. Maḥmad would be a perfect match for the word-form found in the song of songs. But to give into that would of course be to allow for the Quran what they so readily consider acceptable for Hebrew, and are not willing to grant that. Double standards, plain and simple.

I made some diagrams of al-Dānī's ʾisnāds to the seven eponymous readers in the Taysīr. I thought it'd be nice to go through them, and give a couple of comments about them. So here I give a quick thread with some commentaries. Notable first is that al-Dānī explicitly transmits each readings from two transmitters in two different modes of transmission:
riwāyah: a formal transmission of the specifities of the reading.
tilāwah: a full recitation of the Quran to their teacher which is validated that way.