The Reading Sudan Still Recites

Three of the twenty canonical transmissions are the ordinary recitation of a living region rather than a subject of study, and one of them is al-Duri's transmission of Abu Amr. It is the reading of Sudan, and it is used in parts of the Horn of Africa and of West Africa as well. That fact is worth stating carefully, because the map of who recites what is not the map most people carry in their heads. The transmission of Hafs from Asim covers so much of the world that it is easy to assume the rest are museum pieces, and they are not.

A child in Khartoum learning the Quran learns Abu Amr in al-Duri's line, and what that child hears differs audibly from what a child in Cairo or Jakarta hears, in prolongation, in assimilation and in the vowels of particular words. Neither is a variant of the other. Both are the Quran, transmitted through chains the discipline accepts as sound, and the difference between them is the ordinary condition of the text rather than an accident that needs explaining away. The distribution has a history behind it. Readings travelled with the teachers who carried them and settled where scholarly networks settled, so the map of recitation is really a map of who taught whom over a thousand years. Abu Amr went up the Nile. Nafi went west. Asim, eventually, went into a printing press.