Kitab al-Sab'a fi al-Qira'at (The Book of the Seven Readings)

Kitab al-Sab'a fi al-Qira'at, the Book of the Seven Readings, is Ibn Mujahid's own tenth century primary text, composed at Baghdad in the early fourth century of the Islamic calendar, and it is the actual work that fixed the number of canonical Qur'anic reading traditions at seven and named the readers whose transmissions would count as authoritative. As the founding document of that specific canonical decision within Islamic recitation scholarship, it is the primary and authoritative source for how and by whom the seven reading tradition was established. Its limit is the ordinary one for any medieval primary text, it records Ibn Mujahid's own scholarly judgment about which of the many existing reading traditions of his own time deserved canonical status, a judgment that was itself debated by contemporaries, so its own claims about the readers it selected benefit from the wider scholarly history of Qur'anic recitation alongside it.