The Reading of Sudan

Hafs ibn Umar al-Duri, who died in 246 AH, read to al-Yazidi, who had read to Abu Amr, and the transmission that results is the ordinary recitation of Sudan. It is also used in parts of the Horn of Africa and in parts of West Africa. Together with Warsh and Qalun it makes up the small group of transmissions that a whole population actually uses rather than studies, and it is the only one of the three that does not descend from Nafi.

Sudan is worth pausing on. Its Islamic scholarship has its own long history, running through the riverain teaching centres and the Sufi orders that shaped religious life there, and the choice of al-Duri from Abu Amr belongs to that history rather than to any decision taken elsewhere. A Sudanese child learning by heart is learning a Basran reading in a Baghdadi transmission, carried up the Nile by teachers over a thousand years, and what results sounds noticeably different from the recitation of Egypt immediately downstream. The atlas records these distributions because they are the answer to a question people actually ask, which is not how many readings exist but which one the person in front of them is using. It is also a guard against a common error. A reader who meets a Sudanese manuscript or recording and finds it differing from a Cairo printing may reach for the language of error, of variant or of corruption. None of those words applies. What they have met is a second canonical transmission, taught continuously, with a chain the discipline accepts, in ordinary use by millions of people.