Textual History of the Qur'an: Difference between revisions

Nasser further shows that grammarians such as al-Farra<ref>Ibid. p.167</ref>, and scholars such as al-Tabari readily criticised variants in these same readings shortly before they were canonised<ref>Ibid. pp.41-47</ref> (as did al-Zamakhshari 200 years afterwards)<ref>Ibid. pp.6-7</ref>). Even ibn Mujahid said variants now considered canonical were wrong.<ref>Ibid. pp.59-61 (for specific examples of him criticising such variants, many of which are unique to particular canonical readers or transmitters, see the list and summary table in chapter 2, pp.64-89 of Nasser's follow-up book Nasser, S. H. "The Second Canonization of the Qurʾān (324/936)" Brill, 2020; Similarly, see the [https://data.brill.com/supp/9789004412903/variants.html open access appendix] from Nasser's book and search for the word "wrong" to see which of the variants documented by ibn Mujahid were described as such, whether in terms of transmission or the reading variant itself being wrong; or see the examples given by van Putten on Twitter.com [https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1296392400735277057 here] and [https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1090545330402267136 here]</ref> After ibn Mujahid's book, a genre of literature arose that "''indicates the rising need to provide grammatical and syntactic proofs in order to back up the arguments necessary to assess the superiority of one reading over another.''" <ref>Ibid. pp.60-61 (see also the footnote on p.61)</ref>. Ibn Mujahid's decision to select just 7 readings drew frequent criticism after its publication<ref>Ibid. p.64</ref>. The consensus notion that all variants in these 7 were divinely preserved in a chain back to the Prophet himself only came about later, by which time there was of course no room for arguments and reasoning to try to prove the superiority of one variant over another.<ref>Ibid. pp. 59-61</ref> As Nasser writes, "''The problem that caused heated discussion for centuries afterwards was the origin and transmission of the eponymous Readings; were these Readings transmitted through tawātur or single chains of transmission? Are there Readings better than others or are they equally divine?''"<ref>ibid. p.65</ref>.

If qira'at variants could sometimes arise from the rasm, we should also expect this to occur even in places where the rasm did not vary. Munther Younes highlights a particularly interesting example among the hundreds known.<ref>Younes, M., [https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eQuWDwAAQBAJ&pg=PR1 ''Charging Steeds or Maidens Performing Good Deeds. In Search of the Original Qur'an''], London:Routledge, 2018 p. 3</ref> In {{Quran|4|94}} we have the canonical variants fa-tabayyanū or fa-tathabbatū. In this case, the variant root words do not share even a single consonant in common (bāʼ-yāʼ-nūn  versus thāʼ-bāʼ-tāʼ), but nevertheless both variants fit the defective script of the Uthmanic rasm, which lacked dots and vowels. Other examples of variants with the same rasm include {{Quran|6|57}}, where 4 of the canonical 7 qira'at have yaqḍi l-ḥaqqa  "He judges the truth" rather than yaquṣṣu l-ḥaqqa  "He declares the truth"<ref>[https://corpuscoranicum.de/lesarten/index/sure/6/vers/57 Corpus Coranicum]</ref> and {{Quran|10|30}} where two readers have tatlū (recounts, recites), whereas the other five have tablū (tests) <ref>[https://corpuscoranicum.de/lesarten/index/sure/10/vers/30 Corpus Coranicum]</ref>. In these examples the similarity between the variant readings is graphic (how the rasm looks) rather than phonic (how they sound).