The Quran today is recited in ten distinct canonical reading traditions. These differ from one another in terms of phonology and morphology and, to a lesser extent, meaning. Our earliest formal description of seven of these reading traditions stems from the 10th century, more than three centuries after the Quran was composed and first recited.

Insight into how the early Muslims believed the Quran was to be recited in the crucial early Islamic period, is therefore fully dependent on the trust we place on the sources that describe this centuries after the fact. Using literary sources, the tenth century is a bottleneck.

However, a crucial font of primary sources that give us insight into how the Quran was recited in the early Islamic period has been almost completely overlooked. As early as the 8th century, scribes started adding a system of colored vowel dots to Quranic manuscripts in order to mark the details of these reading traditions. In the context of the ERC Advanced Grant project, QurCan, the PI, Marijn van Putten, is collecting a database of machine-readable searchable transcriptions of hundreds of these vocalized manuscripts. 

Studying these gives us a direct look into how the Quran was recited in the early Islamic period. Doing so reveals a striking result: the majority of the manuscripts do not appear to follow any of the known reading traditions of the later literary sources. In this talk Marijn van Putten will present the database, and will examine one especially remarkable cluster of vocalized manuscripts that reveal similar principles of recitation to one another that deviate starkly from the reading traditions known from the later literary sources.

Marijn van Putten is assistant professor at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics and the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. His research focuses on the linguistics, transmission and history of the Quranic text and the Quranic reading traditions. Besides this, he also researches the linguistic history of Arabic and Berber. He is currently the PI of the ERC Consolidator project: Qurcan: The Canonization of the Quranic Reading Traditions.

Image: A vocalised manuscript held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Arab 350(a)