The Grammarian Among the Seven

Abu Amr ibn al-Ala was a philologist before he was anything else. Basra in the eighth century was the workshop where Arabic grammar was being built, where the language of the desert was being collected from Bedouin informants and turned into rules, and Abu Amr stood near the centre of that work. He is cited in the grammatical literature as often as in the literature on readings, and the two activities were not separate in his hands. A reading is a set of decisions about vowels, about assimilation, about where a word ends and how it joins the next one, and a man who spent his life on exactly those questions brought a particular kind of attention to them.

The tradition remembers him for a smoothness of recitation and for a preference, where the material allowed it, for the easier of two pronunciations. That is a real characteristic and not a compliment invented later. His reading is the Basran one, the third of the seven, and it descends through Basran teachers to the Companions in the same way the Medinan and Meccan lines do. The city itself was a garrison town founded after the conquests, so its recitation had to be carried there rather than inherited on the spot, which is one reason the chains from Basra are argued over in more detail than the chains from Medina. Abu Amr is transmitted by al-Duri and al-Susi, both of them students of the same intermediate teacher, al-Yazidi.