Is the Variant Reading of Ghalabat al-Rum Soundly Transmitted?

Answered by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani

Question

A teacher discussing the readings of the Quran cited the variant ghalabati l-Rum at Quran 30:2, attributed to Ali and other Companions, and rejected it as anomalous for want of mass transmission. This confused me. If the only defect is a lack of mass transmission rather than a broken chain, the reading would still accord with Arabic and with one of the Uthmanic codices, so it could, in principle, be the Quran. Yet it also contradicts what happened in history and what the other readings say. Does this reading have an authentic chain at all?

Answer

In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.

No, the reading ghalabati l-Rum does not have an authentic chain, and your teacher’s conclusion is right, though his reason is not the one the qurraʾ rely on. Only one chain for it appears in the major commentaries, and the man at its center was graded weak by the very critics whose standards you are asking about. Even a sound chain would not have made it the Quran, because Ibn al-Jazari’s third condition means something narrower in the science of readings than it means in hadith. And the collision you noticed with history is real; the commentators had raised it before us as well.

The Third Condition Means Something Narrower Than a Hadith Scholar’s Chain

Ibn al-Jazari (Allah have mercy on him) sets the three conditions out at the opening of al-Nashr: “Every reading that accords with Arabic in some manner, and accords with one of the Uthmanic codices even by implication, and whose chain is sound, is the sound reading, which it is not permitted to reject and not lawful to deny.” [Ibn al-Jazari, al-Nashr fi al-Qiraʾat al-Ashr] He then adds, “Whenever one of these three pillars fails, it is called weak, or anomalous, or baseless, whether it comes from the seven or from someone greater than them.” [Ibn al-Jazari, al-Nashr fi al-Qiraʾat al-Ashr]

You have read that third condition, as almost everyone does, as the ordinary criterion of the hadith scholars. Ibn al-Jazari glosses his own words: “By our saying ‘and its chain is sound,’ we mean that an upright and precise transmitter narrates that reading from one like him, and so on until the chain ends, and that along with this it is well known among the imams of this discipline who have mastered it, not counted by them among the errors or among what one or another of them read anomalously.” [Ibn al-Jazari, al-Nashr fi al-Qiraʾat al-Ashr]

Two clauses sit on top of the chain there: that the reading is well known among the masters of recitation, and that they have not classed it a slip. A report can pass every test a hadith scholar applies and still fail that, because the readings came down not as reports but as a recitation taught mouth-to-mouth. A chain in a book of tafsir shows that a Companion said something. It does not show that the qurraʾ received it and taught it as the Quran.

Mass Transmission Was Never the Requirement, and a Sound Chain Alone Is Not Enough

Your instinct that the appeal to mass transmission (tawatur) is doing suspicious work is sound, too. Some later scholars made mass transmission a condition of this third pillar, and Ibn al-Jazari rejects it: if every point of difference among the readers had to be mass-transmitted, much of what is firmly established from the seven imams would fall away. He says of himself: “I used to incline to this view, then its unsoundness became clear to me, as did the agreement of the imams of the earlier and later generations.” [Ibn al-Jazari, al-Nashr fi al-Qiraʾat al-Ashr] So the man whose three conditions your teacher used did not require tawatur at all, and the reading is still excluded.

Nor does a sound chain by itself make something Quran. Makki ibn Abi Talib (Allah have mercy on him), quoted at length in al-Nashr, treats readings soundly transmitted by solitary chains and correct in their Arabic, and rules them accepted but not recited, “because it was not taken by consensus, it was only taken from solitary reports, and no Quran that is recited is established by a solitary report.” [Makki ibn Abi Talib, quoted in al-Nashr fi al-Qiraʾat al-Ashr]

The Commentaries Agree Against This Reading

The commentaries bear this out. Imam Tabari (Allah have mercy on him), the only one who supplies a chain for it, rules against it: “The correct reading here, in our view, and no other is permissible, is ghulibati l-Rum, with damma on the ghayn, because of the agreement of the authoritative body of the readers upon it.” [Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Jamiʿ al-Bayan] Ibn Atiyya (Allah have mercy on him) names four Companions who recited it, Ali ibn Abi Talib among them (Allah be pleased with him), then gives his verdict: “The first narration and the reading with damma on the ghayn is more sound.” [Ibn Atiyya, al-Muharrar al-Wajiz] Imam Baghawi (Allah have mercy on him) names five and closes the same way in Maʿalim al-Tanzil, calling the damma reading the more sound and the position of most commentators.

Imam Qurtubi (Allah have mercy on him) adds something that the others do not. He reports Abu Hatim’s claim, from ʿIsma, that the fatha form was the reading of the people of Sham, then undercuts it: “Ahmad ibn Hanbal says that this Isma is weak, and Abu Hatim reports a great deal from him, and the hadith indicates that the reading is ghulibat with damma on the ghayn.” [Qurtubi, al-Jamiʿ li-Ahkam al-Quran] The one attempt to widen it beyond a few people rests on a weak transmitter. Abu Hayyan (Allah have mercy on him) adds Ibn Abbas and al-Hasan al-Basri, and notes that those who read the first verb as active read the second as passive, sayughlabun, the form you quoted.

The Historical Problem Confirms the Verdict, It Does Not Create It

Now to the history. Read with fatha on the ghayn, the verse no longer says that the Romans were defeated and would afterward prevail. Imam Baydawi (Allah have mercy on him) sets out what forces the sense to become: “And it is read ghalabat with a fatha, and sayughlabun with a damma, meaning that the Romans had prevailed over the fertile country of Syria, and the Muslims would prevail over them.” [Baydawi, Anwar al-Tanzil] Imam Qurtubi then passes a verdict on the passive half of that pairing, narrated from Ibn Umar: “And it is narrated from Ibn Umar that he also read with damma on the ya in sayughlabun, and in this reading there is an inversion of the meaning that the transmitted reports have borne out.” [Qurtubi, al-Jamiʿ li-Ahkam al-Quran] The reports he means are the accounts of the Persian victory and the later Roman recovery, and a few lines earlier, he says the hadith indicates the damma. So the collision you noticed is not a problem for the tradition. It is one of the grounds on which the reading was set aside.

Imam Maturidi (Allah have mercy on him) registers the reading without passing judgment on it, as does Zamakhshari (Allah have mercy on him) in al-Kashshaf. Imam Razi (Allah have mercy on him) and Ibn Kathir (Allah have mercy on him), who both treat these verses at length, do not mention it at all; a reading the masters of recitation had received would not have been invisible to them.

The One Chain Rests on a Narrator the Critics Rejected

Now the chain itself. Imam Tabari transmits it thus: “Ibn Waki’ related to us, saying: my father related to us, from al-Hasan al-Jufri, from Salit, who said: I heard Ibn Umar reciting, Alif Lam Mim, ghalabati l-Rum. It was said to him, Abu Abd al-Rahman: “Over what did they prevail?” He said, over the fertile country of Syria.” [Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Jamiʿ al-Bayan] Its weight rests on al-Hasan ibn Abi Jaʿfar al-Jufri, whom the hadith critics did not treat gently. Imam Bukhari’s (Allah have mercy on him) entry reads: “al-Hasan ibn Abi Ja’far, al-Jufri, of Basra. He is al-Hasan ibn Ajlan. From Abu al-Zubayr. His hadith are denounced.” [Bukhari, al-Tarikh al-Kabir] A few lines later, he records that Imam Ahmad (Allah have mercy on him) declared him weak. Jawzajani (Allah have mercy on him) is blunter: “al-Hasan ibn Abi Ja’far al-Jufri, weak, feeble in hadith.” [Jawzajani, Ahwal al-Rijal] Salit, above him, cannot be securely identified: more than one man of that name reports from Ibn Umar, and the biographers disentangle them differently in Tahdhib al-Tahdhib.

What This Means When You Meet Such a Claim Again

So the honest state of your question is this. The reading is reported, it is named from Companions, and one weak chain carries it, so it fails the third condition on the narrow understanding and on the broad one alike. And the grade was never the decisive thing. Imam Tabari, who had the chain before him, excluded the reading not for weakness in its narrators but for the agreement of the qurraʾ against it, which is exactly the clause built into his third condition.

So when you meet a claim that a reading is Quran because it has a chain, the question is not whether the chain would satisfy a hadith scholar. It is whether the imams of recitation received it, taught it, and counted it among the readings rather than among the slips. If you want to go further, read the opening chapters of al-Nashr with a teacher.

And Allah knows best.

Faraz Rabbani

Related Answers

• What Does It Mean That the Quran Was Transmitted through Tawatur (Mass Transmission)? — lays out the concept of tawatur that this answer relies on and carefully limits.
• How Are Reports of Alternate Wordings in Certain Verses Reconciled with the Doctrine of Quranic Preservation and Tawatur?— the closest companion piece: reported variant wordings explained as companion commentary, never as errors in the preserved text.
• Are the Seven Ahruf (Modes of Recitation) the Same as the Seven Qira’at (Readings) of the Quran? — the background distinction a reader needs before this answer’s technical argument makes full sense.
• Did Ibn Mas’ud View Surat al-Falaq and al-Nas as Non-Quranic? — a parallel case: an anomalous report attributed to a Companion, weighed and set aside by the same careful method.
• Are the Ten Canonical Modes of Recital the Same as the Qur’an? — explains what does count as Quran among the readings, the other half of the line this answer draws.