Vocalizing Muṣḥafs Based on Grammarian Principles or Qāriʾ Readings?

Abstract The characteristic of vocalizing the third person singular masculine pronoun hāʾ with -u ( ḍamma ) in words where the pronoun hāʾ is preceded by -i ( kasra ) or -ī ( yāʾ )—e.g. aḫīhu, fīhu, min amrihu —and in words where the hāʾ is attached to a jussive ( majzūm ) verbal form—e.g. nuʾtihu , nuṣlihu —is widely attested in early Qur’anic manuscripts. The present article is an attempt to demonstrate that although the use of -u for the hāʾ in question is evident in such manuscripts, in practice different approaches to using ḍamma for this pronoun are to be found. Using ḍamma for this type of masculine singular pronoun can be imagined as occurring at several levels and we find varying degrees of adherence to this practice: the highest level includes manuscripts where it is used for all masculine singular pronouns. The next level is those that exclude bihi from this rule. The third level, in addition to bihi , excludes any words preceded by a preposition. In addition to these three categories, there is a group of manuscripts that reveal the use of -u ( ḍamma ) for the hāʾ as the primary reading and instances of -i ( kasra ) as an anomalous and odd reading. The final category is manuscripts that have - u ( ḍamma ) for the enclitic pronoun -hāʾ , according to the above three levels, not as the primary reading but as the secondary reading. This article considers the five categories and the wide temporal spectrum of this practice of vocalizing masculine singular pronouns in manuscripts, spanning at least between the 2nd/8th and 4th/10th centuries. It also extracts data from Islamic literary sources on the approaches taken by readers ( qāriʾ s) and grammarians, raising the possibility that vocalizers in early Islamic centuries mainly followed an indigenous grammatical system rather than the readings of particular qāriʾ s.