Readings · a Light

A Baghdad scholar chose seven readings out of many

Around the year 930 in Baghdad, Ibn Mujahid wrote Kitab al-Sab'a, the Book of the Seven, in which he selected seven reciters whose readings he judged both soundly transmitted and widely followed, and set out their differences systematically. He took three from Kufa and one each from Makkah, Madinah, Basra and Damascus, so the geography of the early community was represented. His seven were not the only readings in use and he never claimed they were. The number stuck anyway, partly because it echoed the report about seven ahruf, and later scholars had to keep explaining that the two sevens are not the same thing. Ibn Mujahid died in 936.

Ibn Mujahid · Baghdad, died 936 CE