Readings · a Light

A blind Andalusian put the seven readings into verse

Qasim ibn Firruh al-Shatibi was born in Xativa in eastern al-Andalus in 538 of the Hijra, which is 1144 CE, and the biographers describe him as blind. He settled in Egypt and died there in 1194. His contribution was a poem, Hirz al-Amani, known to every student as the Shatibiyya, which takes the technical detail of the seven canonical readings and encodes it in over a thousand lines of rhymed verse, using letter symbols to stand for the readers so that the metre holds. Students still memorise it before they are permitted to teach the readings. A body of exact technical information was made portable by being turned into something a person can sing.

Al-Shatibi · Xativa 1144 to Egypt 1194