Variant Readings Preferred by Persians in Safavid Era

Analyzing numerous and diverse Iranian Qur’an manuscripts surviving from the past, may shed further light on the history of transmission of the text of the Qur’an and the history of Shi’ism in Persia, a vast important region of Muslim geography. This article deals with studying the Qur’an manuscripts dating from the rise of copying the Qur’an and the formation of the Qur’an reading circles in Persia following the return of peace to the land, approximately a century after the Mongol invasion and particularly since the emergence of the Safavid state as the first national state in Persia in Islamic times. As reflected in this study, upon the decline of brilliant, inspirational, and independent reading circles, e.g. the early circles of Khorasan after the Mongol invasion, they were in time inspired by those standardized abroad and rose once again by recognizing the standard ‘seven readings’. Variant readings preferred by Persian Shi’a and the forms of recording them in the Qur’an manuscripts copied in the Safavid Persia are indicative of the fact that Persians and Ottomans concertedly preferred the reading of Ḥafṣ narrating from ‘Ᾱṣim. They frequently attested variant readings of Shuʻbah narrating from ‘Ᾱṣim, as their secondly and sometimes as the main and primary preferred reading.