Pronominal variation in Arabic among the grammarians, Qurʾānic reading traditions and manuscripts

Abstract

In the early Islamic period, the literary form of Arabic had an astounding amount of variation in its pronominal morphology. This paper examines the pronominal morphology of especially the third person masculine singular and plural pronouns, as they are described by the early Arabic grammarians, how they appear in the the descriptions of the canonical and non-canonical reading traditions and finally the pronominal systems as they appear in actual early Qurʾānic manuscripts. It is shown that the early grammarians were much more permissive of morphological variation than one would expect from strict norms that appear later. It is also shown that the pronominal systems of the reading traditions go well beyond the kinds of variation described by these grammarians. The systems of these readers show clear clusters (a Kufan, Basran, Hijazi and a ‘Classical’ cluster), even though in the details reading traditions from a single region still often differ from one another. Finally, it is shown that while some of the pronominal systems known in the reading tradition literature also show up in the Qurʾānic manuscripts, there is a significant number of manuscripts that have pronominal systems unlike any of the described systems in the literary sources.