Al-Kisai

Ali ibn Hamza al-Kisai is the last of Ibn Mujahid's seven and the latest of them by a generation. He was a Kufan grammarian of the first rank, the head of the Kufan school of grammar in its long argument with the rival school at Basra, and he was drawn into the orbit of the Abbasid court at Baghdad, where he tutored the sons of the caliph Harun al-Rashid. He died in 189 AH while travelling in Persia in the caliph's company.

The epithet al-Kisai is generally explained by a cloak, a kisa, that he wore or was wrapped in, and the sources tell the story in more than one way. His prominence at court matters to the history of the readings because it is part of how a Kufan reading acquired weight in the new imperial capital, and because al-Kisai's standing as a grammarian gave his choices about the text a kind of authority that a reciter without that reputation could not command. He read first to Hamza, whose reading he learned thoroughly, and then to other Kufan teachers, and out of that material he assembled a reading of his own. The result is the seventh of the seven and one of the ten, transmitted by Abu al-Harith and by al-Duri. His place in the list is the last, and the reason is chronological rather than evaluative: Ibn Mujahid arranged his seven by city and by generation, and al-Kisai was the most recent of the men he accepted. Nothing in the ordering ranks one reading above another, and the discipline has been explicit about that since the canon was fixed.

Al-Kisai learned Hamza's reading before he had one of his own, and the relationship between the two is the clearest illustration in the canon of what a qira'a actually is. He did not invent readings. He did not depart from the consonantal skeleton the Uthmanic codices fix. What he did was choose, at each point where the received material offered more than one defensible way of reciting, and the set of his choices is his reading.

Where he agrees with Hamza he agrees because he learned it from Hamza; where he differs, the alternative he takes is one that other named teachers in the Kufan line were already transmitting. This is why the discipline speaks of a reader ikhtiyar, a selection, rather than of a composition. It also explains a feature of the canon that can look untidy from outside. Readers overlap heavily.

The Kufan three, Asim, Hamza and al-Kisai, share a great deal of material and are distinguished by a body of specific differences rather than by three separate texts. The same is true of the two Medinan readers and the two Basran ones. A canon of ten readings is not ten versions of the Quran. It is one text with a bounded and fully enumerated range of accepted recitations, and the boundaries of that range are what the readers and their chains define.