The Transmission That Stayed at Home

Isa ibn Mina, known as Qalun, was Nafi's stepson and one of his longest-serving students, and he stayed in Medina to teach where Nafi had taught. He died in 220 AH. The nickname is usually explained as Nafi's own praise of his recitation, a word taken from Greek and meaning good, and the story is told in the biographical literature with enough consistency to be worth repeating and enough charm to be worth treating carefully.

Where Warsh carried Nafi's reading to Egypt and beyond, Qalun kept it in the city of its formation, and the two transmissions have been the pair by which the reading is known ever since. Qalun's is the recitation of Libya, where it is what children learn, and it is widely used in Tunisia. That makes it one of the small number of transmissions with a living region rather than a purely scholarly existence, and it means the border between Libya and Egypt is also a border between two ways of reciting the Quran, one of them Qalun and the other Hafs. Nothing about that is felt as a difficulty by anyone on either side of it. It is simply what the map of recitation has looked like for a very long time. Qalun's persistence in Libya is a good corrective to the assumption that the printed editions of the twentieth century swept everything before them. Where a transmission was firmly held by teachers, by schools and by the memory of a population, print followed the local practice rather than displacing it, and Qalun editions are produced for the market that wants them. The dominance of one transmission elsewhere was never a policy.