Chains · a Light

A reciter's licence lists every teacher back to the source

To be certified in recitation a student sits with a teacher and recites the entire Qur'an aloud, letter by letter, and is corrected. At the end the teacher issues an ijaza, a licence, which names the student, names the teacher, then names the teacher's teacher, and continues back through the generations to the Prophet ﷺ. The document is a list of people. Nothing in it rests on a manuscript. The same instrument is used in hadith, and it is why Muslim scholarship produced such large biographical dictionaries: if a chain is a claim, every name in it has to be a person whose dates, teachers and reliability can be checked by somebody else.

Ijaza and sanad in Qur'anic recitation