rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_85b60e02-26f1-5efd-be3c-b447bc2a3951.jpg"/>n’s text would be further codified under the Umayyad governor of Iraq, al-ajjj ibn Ysuf al-Thaqaf (d. 713). Two centuries later, seven vocalizations of the Qur’n’s consonants would be established as acceptable, based on transmissions that traced back to seven well-known reciters from the cities that had received ’Uthmn’s codex. The era in which the Qur’n’s vowels and dots were secured was one in which numerous fields of knowledge underwent a “shift towards the consolidation, standardisation and canonisation of concepts and doctrines.”26
Prior to the advancements in Arabic writing, the textual copy (muaf) of the Qur’n would not have been useful as a source of information. It functioned more as a tool for those who already knew the words to refresh their memorization or teach others, or, as in the case of a caliphal codex, to establish the proper contents and their organization. With the orthographic reforms and fixing of the Qur’n’s vocalization, however, the revelation could speak to new audiences—and these audiences could assert their right to understand the material. The revealed text, which had previously been the territory of oral reciters (qurr’) who traced their knowledge to the Prophet, became accessible to a developing field of professional grammarians (nawiyyn). Efforts to understand the Qur’n encouraged the formation of grammatical schools, which in turn transformed the study of the Qur’n. The grammarians, boasting superior mastery of the Arabic language, competed with the reciters as privileged custodians of the revelation. Their battle for authority would be decided in part by the introduction of paper, which replaced inferior papyrus and amplified the presence of book media in Muslim debates; when the Qur’n became a book to be comprehended through the knowledge of other books and fields of study, the reciters lost.27 Though philologically centered reading had first emerged as a threat to what had been the traditional mode of authority, it became established as a “traditional” method in its own right, since the knowledge of words’ precise meanings promised to push out the reader’s personal subjectivity and restrain oneself within the words. For those who placed confidence in the exact wording of the Qur’n as the means of establishing and regulating truth, the systematic study of Arabic became a prerequisite to authority.
The tradition-innovation binary loses more power here. To preserve tradition means first deciding what counts as tradition and therefore requires the work of preservation, then clarifying what had been left vague or open to dispute, sealing closed any cracks and fissures, adapting to new technologies and fields of knowledge, and redrawing boundaries. To properly shelter the tradition requires more stability than the tradition had ever secured on its own. The refined tradition ends up more guarded from misreadings, and thus narrower in its possibilities, than it could have been without these innovative interventions. After such a process, can it be the same tradition that it had been before getting marked as “tradition”? Even if every letter was preserved exactly as the first Companions received it from Muammad, the process by which Muslims protected the Qur’n from change inevitably changed the Qur’n. The revelation bound in book form strikes me as a memorial to the lost.
Popular Muslim history suggests that Muammad was illiterate, an intellectual virgin. His lack of education presents the textual Qur’n as a miracle, like Mary becoming pregnant without a man’s intervention. Muammad was all shaman, no scientist, no critical theorist. Revelation came to him like the ringing of a bell and made him sweat even in the cold, but he left us with these words that we pick over and throw at each other in rational debates.
Muhammad said that scholars were heirs to the prophets; at least the scholars tell us so. Funny how that works.
For scholars to actualize the role that Muammad had reportedly assigned them, Mu
