A Practice Marking Where Revelation Resumed

Because classical tradition connects Ad-Duha to the end of a painful pause in revelation, certain transmitted recitation styles, most notably the reading associated with the early reciter Ibn Kathir of Mecca, developed a specific liturgical marker at exactly this point: reciters following that riwaya insert the takbir, 'God is greatest,' after completing each surah from Ad-Duha through the end of the Quran when performing a full recitation, a practice known as takbir al-khatm. Classical accounts trace the custom to the same tradition that reads this surah as answering Meccan taunts that revelation had ceased, treating the takbir as a recited acknowledgement that the silence had ended and revelation resumed.

The practice is not universal across all recitation styles, other major reading traditions completing the Quran without this addition, so its presence or absence itself distinguishes one transmitted reading from another, a detail specialists in the science of qiraat, the variant transmitted readings of the Quran, catalogue among the specific practical differences separating the major reading traditions beyond questions of pronunciation or vocalisation alone. Reciters and reading communities that do not follow this particular riwaya complete the Quran without the added takbir, so its presence in a given recitation is itself a small, identifiable marker of which transmitted reading tradition a reciter has trained in.