Hamza al-Kufi

Hamza ibn Habib is remembered with the epithet al-Zayyat, the oil seller, and the tradition takes it literally: he carried oil between Kufa and the towns around it and taught the Quran with the rest of his time. That detail is worth keeping rather than dropping, because it says something true about how this material was transmitted. The readers were not a professional class supported by an institution. They were men with trades who taught in mosques, and the authority of what they taught rested on the chain behind it rather than on any office they held.

Hamza died in 156 AH and is the second of the three Kufan readers among the seven. His teachers were Kufan, and his line runs back through them to Abdullah ibn Masud, which is the standard shape of a Kufan chain. One of those teachers, al-Amash, is himself one of the four readers usually listed after the ten, so a man ranked outside the canon stands directly behind a man inside it, which is a useful corrective to reading the ranks as a scale of reliability in the ordinary sense. Hamza's reading has a reputation the others do not, and it is not about content. It is about difficulty. Reciting it correctly is treated as a specialism, and it has been for a very long time.

Of the ten canonical readings, Hamza's is the one the discipline singles out as demanding. The difficulty lies in two places. The first is his realisation of the hamza, the glottal stop, which in his reading is given a fuller and more deliberate articulation than elsewhere and which interacts in complicated ways with the vowels around it. The second is his treatment of the pause: what happens to a hamza when a reciter stops on a word rather than running it into the next is governed in his reading by a body of rules with more branches than most readers require, and a reciter who has not learned them will get it wrong audibly.

Manuals of recitation devote separate chapters to Hamza for this reason, and a student who can recite him is understood to have done real work. It is worth being clear about what this difficulty is and is not. It is not a claim that his reading is less well attested, less sound or less authoritative: he is one of the seven, his chain runs back through Kufa to Ibn Masud, and no scholar of the discipline has ranked him below his colleagues on grounds of transmission. It is a claim about the mouth. Some ways of reciting Arabic take more training than others, and this one takes the most. Both of Hamza's transmitters, Khalaf and Khallad, preserve that difficulty rather than easing it, which is what the discipline would expect of them.