Ibn Kathir al-Makki

Abdullah ibn Kathir was born in Mecca and taught there, and the reading that bears his name is the reading of the sanctuary. He belonged to the generation of the Followers, the students of the Companions, and died in 120 AH, which places him among the earliest of the seven readers and a good deal closer to the first generation than most of them. His family was of Persian descent, which the epithet al-Dari is usually taken to record, and nothing about that was unusual in a city that drew scholars from everywhere the pilgrimage reached.

The Meccan line matters in the same way the Medinan one does. Mecca received one of the codices Uthman distributed, and the recitation practised around the sanctuary was held to run back through Abdullah ibn Abbas, the Prophet's cousin and the most cited of the early exegetes, to the Companions who had first collected the text. Ibn Kathir's teachers are named in that line. What his reading does not have is a modern region.

Where Nafi went west with Warsh and Asim went everywhere with print, Ibn Kathir is now studied rather than used: it is learned in the schools of recitation, examined, and preserved in the works of the discipline, but no congregation anywhere recites it as its ordinary practice. That is the condition of most of the twenty transmissions, and it says something about how the canon works. A reading does not need current use to hold its place in it. It needs a chain.

The two men who transmit Ibn Kathir are separated from him by more than a hundred years. Al-Bazzi died in 250 AH and Qunbul in 291 AH, while Ibn Kathir himself died in 120 AH, so neither of them ever heard him recite. That looks at first like a hole in the chain, and it is worth saying plainly that it is not one, because the shape recurs throughout the canon and misreading it produces the wrong picture of the whole discipline. The pairing of a reader with two named transmitters is not a claim that the two studied under him. It is a claim about which onward lines the discipline accepted as carrying his reading accurately, and each line has its own intermediate teachers, named and scrutinised in the same way. Al-Bazzi was a muezzin at the sanctuary and taught the reading in the city where it had been formed.

Qunbul lived into the generation of Ibn Mujahid himself, which is how the Meccan reading reached the man who fixed the number of readings at seven: a canon is assembled from the teachers its compiler could actually reach. The two Meccan lines differ from each other in the way every such pair does, in detail rather than in substance, and both are treated as carrying Ibn Kathir. What the century between them and the reader shows is that this material was transmitted by institutions and not by single lifetimes.