Al-Duri an Abu Amr

Hafs ibn Umar al-Duri, who died in 246 AH, read to al-Yazidi, who had read to Abu Amr, and the transmission that results is the ordinary recitation of Sudan. It is also used in parts of the Horn of Africa and in parts of West Africa. Together with Warsh and Qalun it makes up the small group of transmissions that a whole population actually uses rather than studies, and it is the only one of the three that does not descend from Nafi.

Sudan is worth pausing on. Its Islamic scholarship has its own long history, running through the riverain teaching centres and the Sufi orders that shaped religious life there, and the choice of al-Duri from Abu Amr belongs to that history rather than to any decision taken elsewhere. A Sudanese child learning by heart is learning a Basran reading in a Baghdadi transmission, carried up the Nile by teachers over a thousand years, and what results sounds noticeably different from the recitation of Egypt immediately downstream. The atlas records these distributions because they are the answer to a question people actually ask, which is not how many readings exist but which one the person in front of them is using. It is also a guard against a common error. A reader who meets a Sudanese manuscript or recording and finds it differing from a Cairo printing may reach for the language of error, of variant or of corruption. None of those words applies. What they have met is a second canonical transmission, taught continuously, with a chain the discipline accepts, in ordinary use by millions of people.

Al-Duri is the only transmitter in the canonical ten who appears under two different readers. He carries Abu Amr, through al-Yazidi, and he carries al-Kisai, from whom he read directly. That is why his name on its own never identifies a recitation: al-Duri an Abu Amr and al-Duri an al-Kisai are two distinct entries in the canon, with two distinct chains, and a citation that says only al-Duri has failed to say which one it means. The atlas keeps them as separate rows for exactly that reason, and each links to its own reader. The situation has a mirror on the other side of the scheme.

Khalaf ibn Hisham appears twice as well, but as a transmitter under Hamza and as a reader in his own right, which is a different kind of doubling. Between them the two men account for the only places where the neat grid of ten readers and twenty transmissions folds back on itself. Al-Duri lived at Baghdad in the third century of the Hijra, at the point where material from every centre of recitation was being brought together and compared, and the fact that one man could hold two full readings to the standard the discipline required is a fair measure of what that scholarly world was capable of. There is a further reason to keep the two apart on the page. The two readings al-Duri carries do not descend from the same city.

Abu Amr is Basran and reaches him through al-Yazidi; al-Kisai is Kufan and reaches him directly. Two chains, two cities, two sets of recitational choices, one transmitter. The convention of naming a transmission X from Y exists precisely so that this can be said without ambiguity, and it stops working the moment the second half of the name is dropped.