Revelation and Falsification: The Kitab al-qira'at of Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Sayyari.

• Author: Lawson, Todd
• Position: Book review

Revelation and Falsification: The Kitab al-qira'at of Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Sayyari. Edited by ETAN KOHLBERG and MOHAMMAD ALI AMIR-MOEZZI. Texts and Studies on the Qur'an, vol. 4. Leiden: BRILL, 2009. Pp. viii + 363 + 201 (Arabic). $259.

The author or compiler, or better, the name to which this beautifully edited collection of traditions is traced, is (Abd Allah Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Sayyar, known chiefly in the literature as al-Sayyari after his grandfather, or, by turns, as al-Isfahani, al-Basri, al-Qummi, and al-Katib. He was active during the imamate of the eleventh Twelver leader al-Hasan al-Askari (254-260/868-873) and is thought to have lived and worked as a scribe for the Tahirids in Nishapur. He had important and strong connections with the ninth--and tenth-century proto-Twelver center in Qumm. We have no precise birth or death dates. Some authorities claim that he did not live into the fourth/tenth century (e.g., Agha Buzurg Tihrani), though this is clearly debatable. It is pointed out that he was held to be part of a diverse group of "extremists" (ghulat), so designated by later Twelver Shi'ite authorities in particular historical circumstances (about which more below).

The editors of this text are to be congratulated. They have provided a valuable resource and a model of textual scholarship. Through their painstaking efforts they have also supplied in the process a luster of credibility to this collection of the author's troublesome views, or rather, the views of those hadiths that the author collects, which until now have been accessible directly only in rare post-Safavid transcriptions of a ninth-century work. It must be added, however, that identical (if not even more pronounced) views about the corruption of the Uthmanic mushaf have been widely available since the time of the Safavids in those well-known compendious and encyclopedic works of Twelver doctrinal consolidation, including hadith collections and Qur'an commentaries.

This book consists of several parts. The section of most interest to readers of this journal is probably the edition itself. Printed in a beautiful Arabic font with exemplary care, intelligence, and unparalleled knowledge of the pertinent sources, the edition runs to 201 pages. The apparatus could not be more valuable, keyed to four manuscripts fully described in the English introduction (pp. 46-50), together with a tree serenely postulating the transmission of the text, their dates 1076/1666 (M), unknown (L), 1311/1893-4 (T), and 1319/1901 (B). Two of these manuscripts are connected with the notorious al-Tabarsi (d. 1902), author of the incendiary Fas1 al-khitab fi tahrif kitab rabb al-arbab and the slightly more moderate Mustadrak al-wasa'il. The first title is in fact an extended indictment of the 'Uthmanic mushaf and was the topic of an important article written by Kohlberg over thirty-five years ago. The edited text is a collection of 725 separate akhbar or hadiths, complete with asanid. Each report is given its own numbered paragraph and this number is keyed to further invaluable and exhaustive information--bibliographical and otherwise--offered in "Notes," the other major section (pp. 53-289). Given the dates of these manuscripts, one may also postulate that had it not been for the Safavids, this book would have been lost forever.

The text preserves a number of variant readings (qira'at) of the (Uthmanic mushaf, some more dramatic in their implications than others. Kohlberg (pp. 41-42) characterizes these variants as including five distinct types:

(1) a change in vocalization; (2) a substitution of one or more words by another word or words; (3) a change in the order of the words; (4) an addition of one or more words; (5) a combination of elements from categories (1) to (4). As regards their content, the readings may be divided into two main categories: (I) readings carrying an Imami message. These ... termed...