The Emergence of the qirāʾāt: The Divine Permission Hypothesis

Abstract

Various theories for the emergence of the qirāʾāt (variant readings in the Qurʾān) have been suggested. This paper proposes another: the divine permission hypothesis. It shows that the Muslim scholarly tradition appears either to have taken for granted or all-but explicitly stated that the sending down of the Qurʾān was, from the beginning, accompanied by a divine concession permitting a measure of flexibility in its recitation. The paper presents some of the scholarly discussion on the restrictions or controls on this concession, including its being time-bound. The variant readings circulating during the lifetime of the Companions did not all carry the same divine authority—they ranged from those directly taught by the Prophet, to those he specifically approved, to those initiated by the Companions under the general authority of the divine permission. The permission hypothesis offers considerable explanatory efficiency. It allows us to take more of what is recorded in the Islamic tradition at face value; to accommodate the traditions that the Qurʾān was sent down predominantly in the dialect of Quraysh; to link up the seven aḥruf and qirāʾa bi-l-maʿnā traditions; to simplify some of the issues around the so-called ‘Companion codices’; to account for the existence, before the text was standardized, of an unspecified number of variants; to anticipate some of the directions taken in ʿilm al-qirāʾāt; and to make sense of the unease with and critique of qirāʾāt of such towering figures in Qurʾān scholarship as al-Ṭabarī and al-Zamaksharī.