Abu Jafar al-Madani

Abu Jafar Yazid ibn al-Qaqa taught at Medina, died in 130 AH, and belonged to the generation of the Followers. Nafi al-Madani, whose reading stands first in the canonical order, read to him. Abu Jafar's own reading stands eighth. The ordering is not chronological and was never meant to be: the seven that Ibn Mujahid assembled in the early tenth century were a selection made from the teachers whose lines were best established in his own time and in the cities he recognised as authoritative, and the three added later were added later. So the eighth reading is in a real sense older than the first, and the man who taught the first reader ranks below him in the list. A reader coming to the canon fresh should know that, because the numbering invites exactly the wrong inference.

Abu Jafar was a Medinan of the earliest stratum available, reciting in the city where the text had been continuously recited, and the accounts of his teaching describe a long career in the mosque. His reading is transmitted by Ibn Wardan and Ibn Jammaz, both Medinans, and both of them are reported to have read to Nafi as well, so the two Medinan readings are not two separate traditions but two selections drawn from one body of Medinan practice.

Ibn Mujahid settled on seven readings at Baghdad in the early fourth century of the Hijra, and the number stuck hard enough that for centuries afterwards scholars had to argue about what to do with the readers he had left out. Abu Jafar was one of them, along with Yaqub al-Hadrami and Khalaf. The case for their exclusion was never that their chains were unsound, and the discipline is explicit that it was not. Ibn Mujahid was assembling a workable canon from the cities he treated as the centres of transmission, one or two readers to a city, and seven was a number with resonance behind it, since a well known report speaks of the Quran being revealed in seven ahruf. Whether Ibn Mujahid intended his seven to answer to that report is precisely what modern scholarship on him disputes.

Ibn al-Jazari, writing at the turn of the ninth century of the Hijra, settled the matter for the discipline in al-Nashr fi al-Qiraat al-Ashr, the work that gives the ten their standard form. He argued that the three additional readers met the same criteria as the seven on every count that mattered, and the ten have been the working canon ever since. What that history shows is that the canon of readings was assembled by named people, on stated grounds, in known places, and revised once when the grounds were re-examined. It is a scholarly construction resting on transmitted material, and the discipline has never pretended otherwise.