The Transmission of the Variant Readings of the Qur'an: The Problem of Tawatur and the Emergence of Shawadhdh

Shady Hekmat Nasser is a scholar of Quranic studies, and this Brill book is his academic study of how the classical Islamic tradition itself categorized variant readings of the Quran into the canonical, mutawatir and mashhur, and the anomalous, shadhdh, examining the historical arguments early Muslim scholars made for drawing that boundary. Its strength is close engagement with the classical Arabic scholarly sources on qira'at, the science of Quranic readings, tracing how the concept of tawatur, or mass transmission, was actually argued for rather than assumed. Its limit is that it is a study of the classical scholarly tradition's own reasoning about reading variants, a specialist topic within Islamic textual scholarship, not a general introduction to the Quran's history or to Islamic theology more broadly.