Abu Amr al-Basri

Abu Amr ibn al-Ala was a philologist before he was anything else. Basra in the eighth century was the workshop where Arabic grammar was being built, where the language of the desert was being collected from Bedouin informants and turned into rules, and Abu Amr stood near the centre of that work. He is cited in the grammatical literature as often as in the literature on readings, and the two activities were not separate in his hands. A reading is a set of decisions about vowels, about assimilation, about where a word ends and how it joins the next one, and a man who spent his life on exactly those questions brought a particular kind of attention to them.

The tradition remembers him for a smoothness of recitation and for a preference, where the material allowed it, for the easier of two pronunciations. That is a real characteristic and not a compliment invented later. His reading is the Basran one, the third of the seven, and it descends through Basran teachers to the Companions in the same way the Medinan and Meccan lines do. The city itself was a garrison town founded after the conquests, so its recitation had to be carried there rather than inherited on the spot, which is one reason the chains from Basra are argued over in more detail than the chains from Medina. Abu Amr is transmitted by al-Duri and al-Susi, both of them students of the same intermediate teacher, al-Yazidi.

Three of the twenty canonical transmissions are the ordinary recitation of a living region rather than a subject of study, and one of them is al-Duri's transmission of Abu Amr. It is the reading of Sudan, and it is used in parts of the Horn of Africa and of West Africa as well. That fact is worth stating carefully, because the map of who recites what is not the map most people carry in their heads. The transmission of Hafs from Asim covers so much of the world that it is easy to assume the rest are museum pieces, and they are not.

A child in Khartoum learning the Quran learns Abu Amr in al-Duri's line, and what that child hears differs audibly from what a child in Cairo or Jakarta hears, in prolongation, in assimilation and in the vowels of particular words. Neither is a variant of the other. Both are the Quran, transmitted through chains the discipline accepts as sound, and the difference between them is the ordinary condition of the text rather than an accident that needs explaining away. The distribution has a history behind it. Readings travelled with the teachers who carried them and settled where scholarly networks settled, so the map of recitation is really a map of who taught whom over a thousand years. Abu Amr went up the Nile. Nafi went west. Asim, eventually, went into a printing press.