Nafi al-Madani

Nafi ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Nuaym taught in Medina through most of the eighth century, in the city where the Quran had been recited without a break since the Prophet's lifetime, and the reading that carries his name stands first among the seven that Ibn Mujahid set down in the early tenth century. Medina mattered to the reciters for a reason easy to state and easy to underrate.

The codex Uthman sent there was one of a small number of regional exemplars, and the recitation practised in the city was held to descend directly from the people who had learned the text by heart from the Prophet himself. Nafi is reported to have read to a large number of the Followers, the generation taught by the Companions, and to have made his own selection from what he heard rather than reproducing any one teacher. That is what a reading is in this discipline: not a private opinion about the text but a set of choices inside an inherited range, each choice traceable through named people. The sources describe him teaching for decades, long enough that his students belong to two different generations, and two of those students fixed the reading in the form it now has.

Qalun stayed in Medina and Warsh went home to Egypt. Between them they carried Nafi further than any reader except Asim. It is recited today from Morocco to the Sahel, which makes it the reading of a very large part of the Muslim world, and the one most likely to sound unfamiliar to an ear trained on a printed Cairo text.

Nafi taught long enough that his students belong to different generations, and the discipline preserves two of them by name. Qalun, whose given name was Isa ibn Mina, was Nafi's stepson and stayed in Medina. Warsh, whose given name was Uthman ibn Said, came up from Egypt to read to him and then went home again. Between them they define what the reading now is, because a reading survives only in the transmissions that carry it. Nothing of Nafi reaches a reciter today except through one of these two men. The two are not copies of each other. They part company on the treatment of the hamza, on how long a prolonged vowel is held, on where the inclination of a vowel is applied, and on the vowels of a scatter of individual words. A trained ear can tell them apart inside a few verses. This is the ordinary condition of the readings rather than a defect in them. The discipline expects a reading to reach later generations through named men who each preserved a slightly different range, and it records the difference instead of smoothing it away.

Geography did the rest. Warsh's transmission travelled west with Egyptian teachers and became the recitation of the Maghreb, and from there it crossed the Sahara along the trade and scholarly routes into West Africa, where it is still what a child learns first. Qalun's is the recitation of Libya and is widely used in Tunisia. Between the two of them Nafi is the reading of most of Africa west of Egypt, and of almost none of the printed Qurans sold anywhere else.