Qari

A qari is a trained reciter of the Quran, skilled in the rules of tajwid, the exact phonetics of its recitation, and the office concerns the correct and beautiful sounding of the revelation.

The science of recitation

Tajwid is the body of rules governing the recitation of the Quran, the precise articulation of the letters, the lengths of the vowels, the points at which the voice pauses or runs on, the nasalisation and assimilation of sounds, and the qari has mastered these so as to recite the text exactly as it is held to have been given and to have been recited by the Prophet. The office is thus one of exactness in sound, preserving not only the words of the revelation but the manner of their utterance, which is regarded as part of what was transmitted.

Art and transmission

Beyond correctness, the qari cultivates the beauty of recitation, and the great reciters are celebrated across the Muslim world for the power and beauty of their voices, their recordings widely heard, so the office joins a science of exactness to a recognised art. The recitation is learned by long training under a master, ideally within a chain of transmission reaching back through the generations, and there are recognised readings, differing traditions of the recitation, that the qari may master. The office overlaps with that of the hafiz, who memorises the text, and the two are often combined, but the qari is defined specifically by the skilled and correct sounding of the Quran, the guardian of how the revelation is to be heard as much as of what it says.

The Quran is preserved not in one single reading but in a small number of canonical variant reading traditions, qira'at, differing in matters such as vowelling, pronunciation and occasionally word choice while conveying the same consonantal text, and the tenth century scholar Ibn Mujahid is credited with formally fixing seven of these as canonically authoritative, a number later traditions expanded to ten; a qari trains in one or more of these named reading traditions, and which reading is used in a given country today generally reflects a specific historical transmission rather than any live disagreement about the text's authenticity.

Radio broadcasting transformed the reach of the office in the twentieth century, turning a small number of Egyptian reciters, most famously Abdul Basit Abdul Samad, into figures whose recitations were heard across the entire Muslim world via state radio, cassette tape and, more recently, satellite television and internet streaming, so that a listener in almost any country can now access recitations by qaris whose voices, a century earlier, would have been audible only within a single mosque or a single city.

Formal certification follows the same chain-of-transmission model used across other branches of Islamic scholarship: a qari receives an ijazah, a written certificate naming the specific teacher and reading tradition studied, only after reciting the entire Quran correctly before that teacher from memory or from the text, and a qari who wishes to teach in turn must hold such a certificate reaching back through named teachers to an early authority, so that the credential is not a general diploma but a documented personal chain a student can trace teacher by teacher.