Two Students, and Where They Took It

Nafi taught long enough that his students belong to different generations, and the discipline preserves two of them by name. Qalun, whose given name was Isa ibn Mina, was Nafi's stepson and stayed in Medina. Warsh, whose given name was Uthman ibn Said, came up from Egypt to read to him and then went home again. Between them they define what the reading now is, because a reading survives only in the transmissions that carry it. Nothing of Nafi reaches a reciter today except through one of these two men. The two are not copies of each other. They part company on the treatment of the hamza, on how long a prolonged vowel is held, on where the inclination of a vowel is applied, and on the vowels of a scatter of individual words. A trained ear can tell them apart inside a few verses. This is the ordinary condition of the readings rather than a defect in them. The discipline expects a reading to reach later generations through named men who each preserved a slightly different range, and it records the difference instead of smoothing it away.

Geography did the rest. Warsh's transmission travelled west with Egyptian teachers and became the recitation of the Maghreb, and from there it crossed the Sahara along the trade and scholarly routes into West Africa, where it is still what a child learns first. Qalun's is the recitation of Libya and is widely used in Tunisia. Between the two of them Nafi is the reading of most of Africa west of Egypt, and of almost none of the printed Qurans sold anywhere else.