Posted by admin on Apr 10, 2013 in Meditations | 0 comments

Bismi Rabbi ãl-Husayn (S)

و الصلوة و السلام على سيدنا محمد و آله الطيبين الطاهرين، و لعنة الله و الخلق على أعدائهم أجمعين

Dear Friends in Walāyaḧ,

This is Part II of our continuing discussion on the ikhtiyār of Imām Ṣādiq (Ṣ) with respect to the recitation of Ḥamzaḧ ibn Habīb al-Zayyāt, one of the famous Seven Reciters. As I was writing a response to some points brought by one of my Sādāt colleagues to Part I, the length got to the point where it seemed appropriate to digress and make an independent part to the entire discussion.¹

The Sayyid’s Thoughts,²

According to our Sayyid colleague:

Well the Akhbāris have a point about how the Qurʾān (in whichever sense one takes it) cannot be accessed except through the Aʾimmaḧ.

Taḥrīf aside, I think the only reason we have for sticking to the maṣaḥif that we have (based as you know usually only on Ḥafṣ) is that it is what we have been told to do.³

Besides even more problematic is the strong likelihood, based on recent research, that the so-called Muṣḥaf of ʿUthmān is in fact the Muṣḥaf of ʿAbdu ãl-Mālik [b. Marwān] or even of Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf [governor of Iraq during the regime of ʿAbdu ãl-Mālik].[^4] But then, given the strong sense of the imtiḥān [trial or test] involved in being a Muʾmin alienated from the direct presence of the Imām, it is not improbable that the Muṣḥaf is also removed from us and we are forced to recite what is 3rd or 4th hand at best.

My Thoughts

Well the Akhbāris have a point about how the Qurʾān (in whichever sense one takes it) cannot be accessed except through the Aʾimmaḧ.

Of course, this point of view is not at all restricted to Akhbāris 😉 Nūrī, Jazāʾirī – editor of Tafsir Qummi –, apparently Ayatullāh Waḥīd as well, to one degree or other, appear to hold this view.

recent research, that the so-called Muṣḥaf of ʿUthmān is in fact the Muṣḥaf of ʿAbdu ãl-Mālik or even of Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf.

Arthur Jeffrey and others I think are way off the mark on this. For example, even in Arthur’s own book Materials for the History of the Text of the Qurʾān – which includes a critical edition of the Maṣaḥif of Ibn Dawūd – our hero Ḥamzaḧ ibn Habīb narrates that he painstakingly copied his own muṣḥaf from the very copy that ʿUthmān had sent to Kufa. Other traditions say that he copied it from the Muṣhaf of ʿAbdullāh ibn Zubayr. There is no contradiction; this is because the latter was on the committee of Zayd ibn Thābit that formalized the Muṣhaf we use today. So maybe it was Ibn Zubayr who transcribed the Kufan copy sent by ʿUthmān.

Anyway, the orthographical differences or typographical discrepancies between, e.g., the muṣḥaf sent to Makkah, the one kept in Madina, and the one sent to Kufa are well known and recorded by Ibn Dawūd, Dānī, and others.

As for the accursed tyrant Ḥajjāj, he was persona non grata to the Qurrāʾ, the professional reciters of the Qurʾān, despite the fact that Hajjaj himself was a qārīʾ. Al-Aʿmash – a very important scholar, qārīʾ, and companion of Imām Ṣādiq (S) — personally knew Ḥajjāj and vowed to preserve the Muṣhaf of Ibn Masʿūd just to “spite the nose of” Ḥajjāj. Saʿīd ibn Jubayr, finally killed by Ḥajjāj, is another example. He and other Qurra went into hiding during the tyrant’s reign, after leading an attempt to overthrew him in Battle of Jamajim. During his days of hiding, Saʿīd ibn Jubayr remained a fount of religious knowledge, and he continued the qirāʾaḧ tradition of both Zayd ibn Thābit and Ibn Masʿūd, both of whom he knew personally. Kumayl ibn Ziyad of Duʿāʾi Kumayl fame, also killed by Ḥajjāj, was another famous Qari and a close friend of Saʿīd ibn Jubayr.

One of the rebel Qurrāʾ who fleed from Ḥajjāj was the father of the famous reciter Abu ʿAmru, whose qirāʾaḧ is still read in, eg, Sudan and Nigeria, and was popular in Egypt before Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim was published by al-Azhar. It is inconceivable that Abu ʿAmru — or al-Aʿmash, the Shaykh of Ḥamzaḧ and of the entire the Kufan School of Qirāʾaḧ — would recite according to some unique text of Ḥajjāj after the latter’s death.

The Qurrāʾ were just far too powerful for Ḥajjāj to change the Muṣhaf. The one isolated tradition of ʿAuf ibn Abi Jamīlah that suggests that Ḥajjāj made orthographical “changes” in eleven places is just that: quite isolated. We know that Ḥajjāj tried to publish copies of the muṣḥaf of Kufa by sending them to other cities, but the people in those other cities did not appreciate his efforts and nothing official came of it. Hence the Muṣhaf of each of the four cities to which a copy was sent by ʿUthmān maintained its own orthographical peculiarities. If Ḥajjāj had a copy with orthographical “improvements”, these were ignored after his death by the Qurrāʾ, who continued to transcribe maṣaḥif in accordance with their established tradition.

These peculiarities show up in qirāʾaḧ. So Ibn Kathīr, the famous reciter from Makkah, followed the Makkan Muṣhaf and it shows up in a couple of places. Thus, for example, the Kufan text cannot accommodate every aspect of Ibn Kathir’s recitation.

It is more likely that ʿAuf was comparing a mushaf that contained ten orthographical errors with the one distributed by Ḥajjāj. But the isolated nature of ʿAuf’s tradition — without corroboration — makes it impossible to rely upon for the allegation that Ḥajjāj somehow “changed” the Muṣhaf of ʿUthmān.

The circumstantial and historical evidence seems overwhelming that the Muṣhaf in our hands is in fact the Muṣhaf of Zayd ibn Thabit, known as the Muṣhaf of ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān. No, that does not include the dotting and vowelization according to Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim, as some today seem to think. What we have today are the transcriptions of the four-to-seven copies made on the order of ʿUthmān and sent to different cities, each with its own orthographical peculiarites as recorded by Dānī and other early scholars who made a point of examining them and recording these things. The doubts cast by some orientalists do not stand up to the slightest scholarly scrutiny in my view. And even Jeffrey himself does not make this claim as far as I am aware.

In WALAYAH

Idris Samawi