The Reading of Kufa

Asim ibn Abi al-Najud taught at Kufa and died in 127 AH. Kufa was a garrison city on the Euphrates, founded in the first decades after the conquests, and it became one of the great centres of Arabic learning: three of the seven readers are Kufan, which is more than any other city produced. Its recitation was carried there by Companions who settled in it, and above all by Abdullah ibn Masud, whose personal standing in the city was such that the Kufan line is usually described through him.

Asim's own chain is unusually well documented. He read to Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami, who had read to Uthman ibn Affan, Ali ibn Abi Talib, Ubayy ibn Kab and Zayd ibn Thabit, four Companions each of whom had a direct part in collecting or preserving the text; and he read to Zirr ibn Hubaysh, who had read to Ibn Masud. Two independent lines converge on him. The tradition remembers him as a careful and deliberate reciter and as a teacher who insisted on precision, and the two students who carry him, Shuba and Hafs, between them preserve the most studied pair of transmissions in the canon. What happened to this reading afterwards is a matter of print rather than of merit, and it deserves a page of its own.