Divan of variants
۞
What the figures say
Hafs and the other readings: word variants (farsh al-huruf)
What the figures say
99.97%of words share the same skeleton in every reading
99.993%of skeleton letters are identical
2words added or removed, out of 77,430
Eight transmissions, from regions far apart from one another, copied by hand for centuries whose beginning no one can fix with certainty, on parchment and then on paper, through wars, chaos and violence, from the Mashreq to the Maghreb. Anyone who knows how information travels knows there are always losses: a missing packet, a flipped bit. Here, out of 77,430 words, the skeleton differs for only a few dozen, almost always by one letter, and no difference changes the structure of the text: the context is enough to detect them, like an integrity check. These readings are read today from Morocco to Indonesia.