Abstract:

As mentioned in many authentic hadiths, the Qur'an was revealed in seven letters. There is an agreement of the scholars of recitation on the point that these seven letters mean different dialects. As a reflection of these seven different dialect phenomena, the efforts to prevent misreading of the Qur'an date back to the time of the Prophet. However, after the death of the Prophet, people lost the definitive source of information to ask about the recitations they disagreed with. When the conflict in this context increased, the recitation scholars put forward three conditions in order to distinguish the authentic recitation and the non-authentic recitation. The first of these three conditions is that the recitation should reach the Prophet as mutawatir, the second is to be compatible with Mesâhif-i Osman, and the third is to be suitable for any Arabic dialect. Recitation scholars have said that it is not necessary for this dialect spoken by the Arabs to be widespread or to be a dialect on which the nahivists agree. Abu Ishaq al-Hadramî (d. 117/735), Halil b. Ahmed al-Ferahidi (d. 175/791) and Yunus b. Early syntaxists such as Habîb (d. 182/798) avoided making negative judgments about the recitations and their narrators while examining the suitability of the recitations to the dialects. On the other hand, Sîbeveyh (d. 180/796) evaluated the recitations with the rules of the Basra syntax school and accused the recitations that do not comply with these rules as being wrong or ugly, and carried this phenomenon to a different dimension. Kisâî (d. 189/805) also approached recitations with his identity as both a reciter and a linguist, and accepted many recitations that Sîbeveyh rejected as correct and created new syntax rules. Ibn Cinnî (d. 392/1002), on the other hand, wrote al-Muhteseb to reveal the syntax value of the recitations rejected by Sîbeveyh and his followers, and brought this phenomenon to the point desired by the reciters by criticizing Sîbeveyh and his followers.

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