The perfect preservation of the Quran back to the time of Muhammad, Islam’s founder, is a contentious topic. In the popular imagination, each syllable printed in the Quran today is believed to be identical to the way Muhammad taught his followers. One easily gets this impression from modern printed Qurans, the vast majority of which are based on the reading tradition of Hafs in the transmission of Asim. A reading tradition instructs the reader how to pronounce each syllable in the Quranic text. But, this uniformity is a recent development.
Today, Muslims recognize at least seven canonical, equally valid, reading traditions. The Quranic text as it was standardized in the early Arabic script in the middle of the 7th century CE was ambiguous, the script could not express short vowels or distinguish between many consonants. This leads to significant differences in pronunciation. The reading traditions that emerged in the 8th and 9th centuries are the specific prescriptions of how to read each word of the Quran set up by historical specialists of Quranic recitation. Without this tradition of instruction, the Quranic text would be—in some cases—impossible to decipher.
However, the canon of seven reading traditions does not go back to the time of Muhammad. Rather, these came to be seen as especially authoritative only after the 10th century scholar Ibn Mujahid wrote a now famous description of these seven traditions. Up until recently, it was thought that his work functioned as our historical horizon—everything we can know about the pre-canonical situation is filtered through his choices and thinking.
However, there are hundreds of Quranic manuscripts from the time preceding the canonisation stretching back at least to the beginning of the 8th c. that make use of diacritics to instruct the reader. These pre-canonical reading traditions provide a vista into the pre-history of Quranic recitation, yet they have so far gone almost entirely unstudied. QurCan aims to mine these rich historical sources along with the study of literary sources to understand what Quran recitation was like before Ibn Mujahid, and how the reading traditions developed, and how this led to the crystallized canon that we know today.
