The Oil Merchant of Kufa

Hamza ibn Habib is remembered with the epithet al-Zayyat, the oil seller, and the tradition takes it literally: he carried oil between Kufa and the towns around it and taught the Quran with the rest of his time. That detail is worth keeping rather than dropping, because it says something true about how this material was transmitted. The readers were not a professional class supported by an institution. They were men with trades who taught in mosques, and the authority of what they taught rested on the chain behind it rather than on any office they held.

Hamza died in 156 AH and is the second of the three Kufan readers among the seven. His teachers were Kufan, and his line runs back through them to Abdullah ibn Masud, which is the standard shape of a Kufan chain. One of those teachers, al-Amash, is himself one of the four readers usually listed after the ten, so a man ranked outside the canon stands directly behind a man inside it, which is a useful corrective to reading the ranks as a scale of reliability in the ordinary sense. Hamza's reading has a reputation the others do not, and it is not about content. It is about difficulty. Reciting it correctly is treated as a specialism, and it has been for a very long time.