The Hardest Reading to Recite

Of the ten canonical readings, Hamza's is the one the discipline singles out as demanding. The difficulty lies in two places. The first is his realisation of the hamza, the glottal stop, which in his reading is given a fuller and more deliberate articulation than elsewhere and which interacts in complicated ways with the vowels around it. The second is his treatment of the pause: what happens to a hamza when a reciter stops on a word rather than running it into the next is governed in his reading by a body of rules with more branches than most readers require, and a reciter who has not learned them will get it wrong audibly.

Manuals of recitation devote separate chapters to Hamza for this reason, and a student who can recite him is understood to have done real work. It is worth being clear about what this difficulty is and is not. It is not a claim that his reading is less well attested, less sound or less authoritative: he is one of the seven, his chain runs back through Kufa to Ibn Masud, and no scholar of the discipline has ranked him below his colleagues on grounds of transmission. It is a claim about the mouth. Some ways of reciting Arabic take more training than others, and this one takes the most. Both of Hamza's transmitters, Khalaf and Khallad, preserve that difficulty rather than easing it, which is what the discipline would expect of them.