Choosing Inside the Kufan Line

Khalaf learned Hamza's reading, transmitted it, and then made his own selection from the Kufan material, which is the same procedure al-Kisai had followed a generation earlier. His chain and Hamza's therefore run together for most of their length and part only where Khalaf's choices differ. Three of the ten readers are Kufan and a fourth, Khalaf, works entirely inside Kufan material, so a large part of the canon descends from one city's practice, refracted through four sets of decisions. That concentration is not an accident.

Kufa was where Abdullah ibn Masud settled and taught, it was the largest centre of Arabic learning in Iraq for a century and a half, and it produced more reciters of standing than anywhere else. Khalaf is the last of them to be admitted and the last of the ten in the standard order. His two transmitters, Ishaq and Idris, carry his own reading rather than Hamza's, and keeping those two things distinct is genuinely necessary: Khalaf an Hamza and the reading of Khalaf al-Ashir are different entries in the canon and are not interchangeable, even though the same man stands behind both. The atlas keeps them as separate rows for that reason, and links each to what it actually belongs to.