One of the interesting parts of modern Islamic orthodoxy is the belief that the ten canonical reading traditions are transmitted by tawātur, mass transmission so massive that it is unthinkable that people could have agreed upon a lie. The requirement of tawātur doesn't really enter the Islamic discourse until rather late, and while it has become the dominant position, as late as the 15th century people were still giving pushback against it. One of the people who pushed back against this is Šams al-Dīn Ibn al-Jazarī (d. 833 AH/1429 CE), the very same person who wrote a definitive description of the three reading traditions after the seven which are now considered canonical. He is seen as the canonizer of the ten. Ironically the ten are now widely held to be transmitted by tawātur even though he himself emphatically (and cogently) denied this, not just for his three after the ten but even for the seven!
Since this is not widely known, or outright denied, I thought it'd be useful to write up a translation. I've based this off the text of the beautiful edition by Ayman Suwayd.
Before we get into the meat of the argument, it is useful to first know start with the "Pillars of a Valid Recitation" (pg. 117):
The Pillars of Valid Recitation
Each Reading:
- Follows the (grammatical rules of) Arabic, even if just in some aspect.
- And follows one of the Uthmanic codices, even if it only permits it.
- Is sound in its chain of transmission.
This is valid recitation which is not allowed to refute, and not valid to be denied. Indee,d it is from among the seven ʾaḥruf which the Quran was revealed by, and it is acceptable for the people to follow it, whether it is from the seven ʾImāms, or the ten or some other of them from among the accepted ʾImāms.
And when one of these three pillars is lacking, it is dispatched of as weak (ḍaʿīf), unusual (šāḏḏ) or invalid (bāṭil), regardless of whether it is from the seven or from among who is the greatest of them.
A lot is happening in such a short section. What is notable is that these three requirements are interdependent. No matter how good your sound chain of transmission is, even if it's back to one of the seven canonical readings, if said reading doesn't follow proper Arabic grammar or doesn't follow the Uthmanic text, it is still rejected!
Ibn al-Jazarī is channeling a view that was clearly around with earlier authorities, including the canonizer of the seven, Ibn Mujāhid (d. 324 AH/936 CE) who would frequently dismiss canonical readings that he described themselves and had a perfectly valid chain of transmission for, because he considered the grammar to be unacceptable, for example.
This view, by Ibn al-Jazarī's time had clearly come to be under significant pressure. Authorities such as ʾAbū Ḥayyān al-Ġarnāṭī (d. 745/1344 CE) would frequently challenge such dismissals because after all: the reader was a true Arab, so how could he not know what proper Arabic was, and the Isnad was fine. Who are you to say that the language is bad, you can't reject it! With such a line of argumentation, you make two of the three pillars (1 and 2) essentially powerless, and chain of transmission becomes tantamount. It is therefore no surprise that after having weakened two of the three pillars, ʾAbū Ḥayyān invested heavily on the doctrine of tawātur. These readings were mass-transmitted. That was the only way you could plausibly neuter pillar 1 and 2, by making pillar 3 unassailable. Ibn al-Jazarī is implicitly denying these by explicitly saying that things are to be rejected even if they do come from the seven.
What is also worth noting is that Ibn al-Jazarī clearly holds open the door for the possibility that not just the seven, or his ten would fit these requirements. Clearly there are other readings with perfectly valid chains of transmission, which follow one of the Uthmanic codices, and have proper Arabic grammar. And this indeed is clearly the case. Al-Yazīdī's (one of the 4 after then 10) clearly is valid in all those ways, and several; other complete transmissions not covered by the seven or the ten have come down to us in the literary tradition. People often think that anything beyond the ten is šaḏḏ "unusual/non-canonical". But this is not the case as far as Ibn al-Jazarī is concerned.
He then continues to explain precisely what he means with "to be in agreement with Arabic grammar" and "to follow one of the Uthmanic codices". Discussions that are interesting in their own right, and maybe I'll sit down to translate those as well one day but I will skip over it for now. Eventually he comes to the section where he explains his third requirement "Soundness in chain of transmission" (pg. 126).
As for our words: "Is sound in transmission" we mean by it that and honest and trustworthy person transmitted this reading tradition from someone who was likewise, continuing like that until you arrive (at the authority), and in addition it is well-known among the ʾImāms of this matter, the ones who have mastered it, without being considered by them to have fault, or anything that is considered unusual by some of them.
Some modern authors (al-mutaʾaḫḫirīn) required tawātur for this pillar and it is not enough for it to just have a sound chain of transmission. They claim that the Quran can only be established by tawātur and that which comes in a single strand transmission (ʾāḥād) does not establish the Quran.
It is obvious what this implies: If tawātur would establish soundness, then we would not need the other two requirements, that is, adherence to the Uthmanic codices and the other one (adherence to proper grammar). When the words of disagreement were established to come from the prophet by tawātur, we would be required to follow it, as it would be certain that it would be Qurʾān regardless of whether it followed the Uthmanic text or differed from it.
And if we would require tawātur of each word among the words of disagreement that are established from these seven ʾImāms (i.e. the seven canonical readers) and others besides them would be rejected.
Previously, I used to incline towards this opinion, but then its wrongness became clear to me. Following the ʾImāms of the first generations (salaf) and those that followed (ḫalaf) is the better option.
He then continues to cite examples of other authorities who have likewise not required tawātur. Here again we are confronted with an extraordinary example of lucid reasoning. The laconic dismissal of the requirement of tawātur leads to what Ibn al-Jazarī considers a logical absurdity: If it is really true that transmission needs to be so massive that nobody could disagree on its truth, then the other two pillars become absurd. 1. The Uthmanic text postdates the prophet, if there were a mass transmission of a reading that didn't follow the Uthmanic codex, you could obviously not dismiss such a (purely hypothetical!) reading just because it doesn't follow a written text that did not even exist at the time of the prophet. That's the whole point of tawātur.
Even more implicit (Ibn al-Jazarī was perhaps embarrassed to have to point out just how heretical the claim was): if there really is tawātur, the requirement of sound grammar becomes nonsensical. If there was tawātur, as a Muslim, one would have to accept it as certainly from the prophet -- and by extension that it is the literal word of God. And then this requirement is supposed to mean that this reading be subjected to the question whether or not it agrees with the grammar of Arabic? Are Muslims to be the school teachers of God checking His Arabic?
But after the hypothetical example of a tawātur reading that doesn't follow the Uthmanic text (something Ibn al-Jazarī clearly does not actually believe exists), he then turns to the concrete: For the vast majority of the words of the Quran everyone is simply in agreement how to recite it. Not just among the ten canonical readers, but even beyond it. Clearly such words, which make up the majority of the text, do meet the requirement of tawātur. But it is the words of disagreement, i.e. words where not all readers agree on how to read it where stipulating tawātur becomes difficult.
This becomes especially difficult in the case of unique readings. Among the twenty canonical transmitters of the ten canonical readers only the now dominant Ḥafṣ (d. 180 AH/796 CE) reads kufuwan in Q112:4, all others read kufuʾan (and Ḥamzah kufʾan). This doesn't change massively if we start including chains of transmission outside of the twenty canonical transmitters. In other words: this reading is isolated, and the transmission of Ḥafṣ was not such a prolific teacher, and his chain of transmission does not reach back to a huge number of companions of the prophet. Logically, Tawātur cannot be claimed for such a point of disagreement. Ibn al-Jazarī understood this.
Even in practical terms, this is clear: the great exegete al-Ṭabarī (d. 310 AH/923 CE) does not seem to show any awareness of readings that are unique to Ḥafṣ, while he is well aware of different readings, and cites them extensively in his exegesis. Is that what a reading that is so massively transmitted that nobody could not know about it looks like? No, of course not.
But of course, one may be forgiven for being swept up in the zeal of declaring absolute certainty about the recitation of the Quran, after all Ibn al-Jazarī, obviously a razor sharp thinker himself used to think that tawātur was necessary and possible for the readings as well, and it took time for the wrongness to become clear to him. Luckily for us, he shared with us his excellent logic.
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