Me and my dear friend and colleague Hythem Sidky keep on telling each other that every time we're at a conference, we should get pins that read ليس الرسم بقراءة "The consonantal skeleton is not a reading!", because this motto highlights an extremely common misunderstanding within the field. I'm attempting the description of this mistake a bit, so it can be written down somewhere and cited from that point onward. This is a first draft at me putting these thoughts together into writing.
Readings follow the consonantal skeleton.
One of the main requirements for a reading to be considered valid is that it needs to follow the standard consonantal skeleton, as standardized by ʿUṯmān. As a result, all ten canonical reading traditions today are in agreement with the Uthmanic Text.
But, what is commonly misunderstood is that this is not some kind of feature unique to the seven or the ten canonical readers. The Islamic tradition records many other readers that have perfectly Uthmanic readings, that is, readings that agree with the Uthmanic text, for example: al-Yazīdī, Sallām ʾAbū al-Munḏir, ʾAbū Ḥātim al-Siǧistānī, ʾAbū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b. Sallām, just to name a few. Moreover, if we turn to vocalised manuscripts from the early Islamic period, they are all perfectly Uthmanic, and so necessarily the reading that is marked with these vowels have to agree with the Uthmanic text. But vocalised manuscripts very frequently reflect readings that fall well outside anything covered by the Islamic tradition, but they are nevertheless perfectly Uthmanic. There are, therefore, countless readings that agree with the rasm.
Sometimes the rasm can contain hints of the reading that the scribe had in mind. Perhaps they placed some consonantal dots in place where there is actually disagreement among the readers on the consonantal dot. But usually there is so much ambiguity in early, barely dotted, manuscripts that even if every single case you check fits one of the readings you know, this still does not necessarily mean that the text is written according to that reading. All this means is that the text is consistent with that reading. Especially with readers from similar regions, it is actually very likely that multiple readers would be consistent with a certain manuscript. This is a good indication that the person who wrote the text was also from that region, and was familiar with readings from that region, but it does not mean we can with certainty identify the reader intended by the scribe.
The Regional rasm dictates the regional reading, not the other way around
The regional codices of Medina, Basra, Kufa and Syria are not perfectly identical to one another in terms of consonantal skeleton. Here and there a regional codex has a letter less or more, or a slightly different spelling. In one notable case there is a word absent in the Medinan and Syrian codices, which is present in the Kufan and Basran codices, namely in Q57:15 فان الله [هو] الغنى الحميد. As a result the Syrian and Medinan readers read fa-ʾinna ḷḷāha l-ġaniyyu l-ḥamīd, whereas the Kufan and Basran readers read fa-ʾinna ḷḷāha huwa l-ġaniyyu l-ḥamīd. Save a couple of small disagreements among the canonical readers, all readers in a certain region in principle follow their regional rasm. In other words, the rasm dictates what they read, and not the other way around. This is clear from the fact that these regional rasm variants make a stemma, even if you use just the manuscripts we have.
All too often, however, in discussions of early manuscripts such points are presented as the rasm being adjusted to accomodate the reader. This clearly is not what is happening, as if it were simply up to the whims of the reader on how to read, and the scribe slavishly followed that, rather than some existing regional norm of the written text, we would not at all expect a stemma too appear.
All Readers postdate the consonantal skeleton
The previous two points already point out that there are good reasons to think of the rasm as primary, and the readers simply following it. This is not to say that scribes would never at any point be persuaded to let their reading of a verse influence how they would write it down. They probably would, but that is clearly not the general direction of things. Another reason why the rasm is clearly primary is for the rather basic fact that the rasm is much much earlier than most readers for whom we have a full description, and certainly those that belong to the canon. When the rasm was established, during the reign of Uthman (23-35 AH), none of the canonical readers had yet been born (except perhaps Ibn ʿĀmir, if you believe he really did live until the ripe age of 110!). Even when most of our earliest manuscripts were written, most of the readers were either still infants or had not even been born.
Just for reference these are the death years in order of earlierst to latest of the 10 canonical readers, their main transmitters from whom we actually receive the readings are later: ibn ʿĀmir (d. 118/736); ibn Kaṯīr (d. 120/738); ʿĀṣim (d. 127/745); ʾAbū Ǧaʿfar (d. 130/747); ʾAbū ʿAmr (d. 154/770); Ḥamzah (d. 156/773); Nāfiʿ (d. 169/785); al-Kisāʾī (d. 189/804); Yaʿqūb (d. 205/820); Ḫalaf (d. 229/844).
Therefore saying that any manuscript that predates these readers, which many of them do, is written "in" their reading is simply anachronistic. (On the other hand, if you do find a vocalised manuscript that follows a canonical reader or transmitter perfectly, and the section of the manuscript displays enough distinctive features, then you can certainly date such a manuscript to their lifetime at the earliest, but most likely after their lifetime).
A manuscript is not written according to a "Mix of Readings"
As most of the readers we have access to postdate our earliest manuscripts, it should not surprise us that when we try to extract some reading information from the sparse consonantal dotting in such a manuscript, this will often yield a list of specific variants that do not correspond to any known reader. I frequently see this inverted, discussions well say that a manuscript X shows the readings of reader A, B and C. Which is then construed as a scribe grabbing readings from all over the place and putting them in their manuscript. But this is obviously not what is happening. The scribe of manuscript X simply chose to represent a single reading -- presumably the reading he would recite himself -- and the variants that they have, happen to sometimes correspond to readings that reader A adopted, and other times what reader B adopted and other times what reader C adopted. He is not "mixing" their readings (For earlier manuscript since they hadn't been born, that doesn't make sense. But even for later manuscripts this is not the obvious explanation), he is simply reflecting a reader.
You could do the same time by looking at canonical readers. If you would look at the specific choices Ḫalaf makes, sometimes he has the reading of Ḥamzah and other times the reading of al-Kisāʾī and rarely a reading that neither of them have. Ḫalaf really did combine the readers from both of these Kufan readers, but the result is his OWN choice of variants. He is not trying to represent a "mix" of readings, but what he considered a (personal) right way to recite the Quran. This is how one should think of the "cocktail of readings" in any manuscript as well. By looking closely at what regions a manuscript most often aligns with you might be able to get a sense in what milieu it was written (e.g. if it has a lot of readings that are typical for Basra, it's more likely to be a Basran manuscript), but it doesn't mean that the intention is to reflect multiple readings at once. It is reflecting a single reading.
Readings have nothing to say about the consonantal skeleton
A final point that is worth making within the context the rasm not being a reading, is also that a reading is not the rasm. Because the modern print editions such as the Medina Quran are printed according to the reading of Ḥafṣ from ʿĀṣim, many scholars and lay people alike assume that all that is in such a print edition is part of the reading of Ḥafṣ, even specific orthographic idiosyncrasies. But this is wrong. The information of a reading is purely the phonetic layer of the Quran: how exactly the Quran is pronounced according to this reader. But it contains no information about how words are spelled. So, for example, the beginning of Q18:23 is read by Ḥafṣ as wa-lā taqūlanna li-šayʾin "And never say of anything". This is the information carried by his reading. But in the modern print editions it is spelled ولا تقولن لشاى with the irregular and unusually spelling of šayʾ with an extra ʾalif, rather than the typical spelling without found all throughout the rest of the Quran (e.g. لشى in Q16:40). This is a question of rasm and it is stypulated in rasm works, and has absolutely nothing to do with reading, and certainly is not something communicated in the data of Ḥafṣ' reading.
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