The Development of Mašriqī and Maġribī Pedagogical Canons of Qur'anic Reading Traditions (4th–8th/10th–14th cs.)

To what extent was the historical transmission of the Qurʾanic Reading Traditions (qirāʾāt) governed by a single “canon”? Modern scholarship agrees on a narrative in which a so-called canon of 7 Reading Traditions was first established by Ibn Muǧāhid in his seminal Kitāb al-Sabʿah, only to be replaced some five centuries later by a canon of 10 Reading Traditions put forward in the works of Ibn al-Ǧazarī (d. 832/1429). 

This paper proposes an alternative scenario, in which scholars of the Reading Traditions in both the Maġrib (Egypt westward) and Mašriq (Transjordan and Arabia eastward) simultaneously developed distinctive “pedagogical canons”: a corpus chosen and reproduced by actors and institutions within a given intellectual discipline in order to ensure the continuity and stability of domain-specific knowledge (Sayeed and Qaouar 2023). Recognition of the existence of multiple canons in the discipline of the Reading Traditions enables a superior historical account of the independent chronological and generic development of the Maġribi and Mašriqi canons, and additionally illuminates several important pedagogical developments that took place after these corpora came into contact in the generation of the students of Abū al-Qāsim al-Šāṭibī (d. 590/1193) at the beginning of the Baḥrī Mamlūk period.

 

Jeremy Farrell is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), as part of the ERC-Consolidator project QurCan: The Canonization of the Quranic Reading Traditions. His scholarship utilizes text critical and computational methods in order to study diverse aspects of Islamic society and Arabic literature, particularly the influence of textuality on the large-scale transmission of vital cultural information.