Nafi al-Madani

The Quran is transmitted in a set of accepted readings, and the fact is often misunderstood from outside as though it meant competing versions. It does not. The consonantal skeleton is one; the readings differ in vowelling, in the placing of a small number of consonantal points, in some morphological forms, in pausing, and in a few words where an alternative is preserved. Each reading is a transmitted performance of the same text, learned by ear from a teacher who learned it the same way, and its authority rests on that chain rather than on any manuscript.

Nafi was the recognised authority of Medina in the generation when these readings were being fixed, and he is reported to have learned from a number of teachers of the generation after the companions, taking what they agreed on. In the tenth century Ibn Mujahid set out seven readers as canonical, one for each of the principal centres, and Nafi is the Medinan among them; the list was later extended to ten. Each reader is known through named transmitters rather than directly, so a reading is always cited as the reading of one man through another, and the pairing is part of its identity.

The seven were not chosen arbitrarily. Ibn Mujahid selected readers whose recitation was already established in the great centres, Medina, Mecca, Kufa, Basra and Damascus, and whose chains of teachers could be traced, which made the canonisation a recognition of practice rather than an imposition on it. Readings outside the list continued to be studied and are recorded in the specialist literature; they are described as unusual rather than as wrong, and a few are cited in legal argument to this day.

Nafi reading survives through two transmitters, Warsh and Qalun, and the geography of their use is the reason he matters to a reference work. Warsh from Nafi is the standard recitation across North Africa west of Egypt and through much of West Africa, and Qalun from Nafi is used in parts of Libya and Tunisia, while most of the rest of the Muslim world uses a different reading entirely, that of Hafs from Asim. The practical consequence is that a printed copy of the Quran bought in Morocco is not identical in its markings to one bought in Cairo, and a reciter trained in one will notice the difference at once.

The differences are small in extent and completely conventional in status. They concern vowels, some pronunciation and assimilation, and a handful of readings where the tradition preserves more than one, and no side regards the other as reciting a different book. What is transmitted alongside the text is a licence: a reciter who has recited the whole Quran to a teacher in a given reading receives an authorisation naming the chain of teachers back through the transmitter and the reader, which is a living document of the same kind of chain that hadith criticism works with, and in this case one that is still being issued.