Asim al-Kufi

Asim ibn Abi al-Najud taught at Kufa and died in 127 AH. Kufa was a garrison city on the Euphrates, founded in the first decades after the conquests, and it became one of the great centres of Arabic learning: three of the seven readers are Kufan, which is more than any other city produced. Its recitation was carried there by Companions who settled in it, and above all by Abdullah ibn Masud, whose personal standing in the city was such that the Kufan line is usually described through him.

Asim's own chain is unusually well documented. He read to Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami, who had read to Uthman ibn Affan, Ali ibn Abi Talib, Ubayy ibn Kab and Zayd ibn Thabit, four Companions each of whom had a direct part in collecting or preserving the text; and he read to Zirr ibn Hubaysh, who had read to Ibn Masud. Two independent lines converge on him. The tradition remembers him as a careful and deliberate reciter and as a teacher who insisted on precision, and the two students who carry him, Shuba and Hafs, between them preserve the most studied pair of transmissions in the canon. What happened to this reading afterwards is a matter of print rather than of merit, and it deserves a page of its own.

Somewhere between nine and ten Muslims in ten who recite the Quran today recite Asim in the transmission of Hafs. It is what is taught in most of the Muslim world, what is printed in most editions, what is heard on most recordings, and what a non-Muslim reader encountering a translation is almost certainly reading alongside. It is very easy to conclude from that reach that Hafs is the Quran and that the other nineteen transmissions are variants of it. That conclusion is wrong, and correcting it is most of the reason this type exists in the atlas. The reach is recent and it is a fact about technology.

In 1924 an edition was printed in Cairo which set Asim in Hafs's transmission in type, with a settled orthography and a full apparatus of recitation marks, and the plates of that edition and its successors went everywhere printed books went. Nothing was ranked, deprecated or withdrawn. The other transmissions kept exactly the standing they had, which is the same standing: all twenty are held to be transmitted by mass parallel chains, and none has authority the others lack. What changed was that one of them became cheap to reproduce at the moment when reproduction started to matter more than teaching lineages. Asim's reading is first among equals only in the sense that a bestseller is the best book. The discipline has never said otherwise, and its own reference works still treat all ten readers together.