Al-Bazzi, Qunbul and a Gap of a Century

The two men who transmit Ibn Kathir are separated from him by more than a hundred years. Al-Bazzi died in 250 AH and Qunbul in 291 AH, while Ibn Kathir himself died in 120 AH, so neither of them ever heard him recite. That looks at first like a hole in the chain, and it is worth saying plainly that it is not one, because the shape recurs throughout the canon and misreading it produces the wrong picture of the whole discipline. The pairing of a reader with two named transmitters is not a claim that the two studied under him. It is a claim about which onward lines the discipline accepted as carrying his reading accurately, and each line has its own intermediate teachers, named and scrutinised in the same way. Al-Bazzi was a muezzin at the sanctuary and taught the reading in the city where it had been formed.

Qunbul lived into the generation of Ibn Mujahid himself, which is how the Meccan reading reached the man who fixed the number of readings at seven: a canon is assembled from the teachers its compiler could actually reach. The two Meccan lines differ from each other in the way every such pair does, in detail rather than in substance, and both are treated as carrying Ibn Kathir. What the century between them and the reader shows is that this material was transmitted by institutions and not by single lifetimes.