Question: Do the various differences in rasm or how a word is pronounced alter the meaning?
If I may butt in, yes it does and these differences can be substantive.
For example, in Aqidah Ahlu Sunnah, as per
Alwasatiyyah by Ibn Taymiyyah, one of Allah’s attributes is that he gets amazed (صفة العَجب). The supportive evidence for this is in the Sunnah and not the Quran. There is no one single verse in the Quran which attributes amazement to Allah.
Until you take into account this verse [37:12] (بل عجبتَ ويسخرون) as it is read by Alkisa’i (الدوري عن الكِسائي) . In this
Qira’h or recitation, the addressee or ‘vocative’ suffixed pronoun (ضمير المخاطَب) stops being Muhammad and becomes that of the speaker i.e Allah is amazed by their mockery (بل عجبتُ ويَسْخَرون).
As you can see, this is fundamental and too much rides on it; it's about Tawhid (the first part of Shahada) and about positively stating whether or not Allah is or has something in himself.
Another important and substantial difference brought about by the differences of realisation or pronunciation is a particular verse in surah Yaseen [36:38] (والشمسٌ تَجْري لِمٌسْتَقَرٍ لها), where in a different
Qira'ah of the authentic seven, out of the thirteen,
Qiraat, it is rendered as (والشمسُ تَجْري لا مٌستَقرَ لها) --- I can't remember which one because I'm drunk now but take me to task over it and I will certainly do a little bit of research and give you the exact name of it; I promise. In it, the verse means the sun moves or runs never stopping or never being stationary. This, therefore, is supportive of the geocentric view of the universe (Hello CallMeTed, wherever you are!). Reliant on it, the former Saudi Grand Mufi, Ibn Baz, has declared that any Muslim who says that the sun is stationary has committed Kufr because they have rejected and or do not believe what Allah in His book has said about the position of the sun, that it runs or moves.
Let me get a bit technical now. Another example where the
Rasm (الرَّسْم أو الإملاء) and realisation are at variance is in the word Rhman (الرّحمن). It should’ve been with a normal Alif (e.g. الرّحمان). Because the *verbal* stem or source (رَحَمَ) has changed its grammatical identity in this case to a superlative *adjective* and this new identity necessitates the use of a particular morphological metre (فَعْلان), the
Rasm has to reflect and adhere to it as well.
To make this clearer, the Arabic source <angered> for example is
Ghadhab (غَضَبَ) and this verb is morphologically identical to the previous source or stem (رَحَمَ) in numerical and or phonemic sense (فِعْل ثلاثي). Thus, to put this verb into an adjectival form expressing qualitative superlativeness (that is to say, the agent is full of an attribute, rather than acts it all the time), you inescapably need to use the metre (فَعْلان) and say or write it as
Ghadhbaan (غَضْبان).
In both these examples (رَحَمَ - غَضَبَ), the sources or stems end in voiced bilabial consonants (one nasal and sonorant [ m ] and the other is oral and stop [ b ] ), therefore, there's no need to consider anything that happens further back in the mouth (i.e. the glottal stop) that could justify this departure from the rule of having an Alif in the
Rasm.
(Incidentally, a similar superlative metre (فعّال), which expresses that a thing is done a lot or all the time by somebody or something, gets the Quran into some difficulty in a particular verse [41:46] (وما ربك بظلّام للعبيد). Here, the verb (ظَلَم) is put in an adjectival form which denotes that Allah is not full of injustice. The semantic opposite of it or what is known in tafsir as (مفهوم المخالَفة) is that, when holding His slaves to account, Allah is unjust in small doses or some of the time.)
I have surat Alfatiha in mind in regard to the {ri]Rasm[/i] of
Rhman (الرحمن) but you can find more inconsistencies in it. The first is that the
Basmala (بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم) is a
verse even though it does not get read out, at least in the entirety of Saudi Arabia, as a part of the chapter. Just like the attribute of amazement above, this is significant because Alfatiha is one of the fourteen pillars of the prayer i.e. if you do not read it in any
Rakah (ركعة), then your prayer is invalid.
Further, the word (بسم) is made up of two items; the preposition (بِ) that prefixes it and the noun (اسم). Thus, it is written as (بِاسم) everywhere in normal Arabic because the
Hamza is 'connective' or nexus (همزة الوصل). You drop this particular Hamza from the
Rasm but you cannot ever drop the Alif according to the rules and or Arabic tendencies. However, it is true that people write it in non-Quranic contexts as (بإسم), keeping the Hamza in against the rules and tendencies, but this is probably to conveniently distinguish it -- with the connective Hamza dropped -- from another identical item (the resultant homograph is the male first name Basm/باسم which means 'smiling'). Be that as it may, the Alif must in all cases be kept in the Quranic text even though it is currently absent.
Also, you can see the unusual Quranic rasm of <Allah> (الله) which should have been written as (الّلاه) as some critics say and these are the ones that argue this departure from the rules or more prevalent tendencies is due to separating Allah from the spelling of
Allat (الّلات), which apparently was another local god. Ho-hum.
In the fourth verse of Alfatiha there's a word which can be read in two different ways at the same time; one as Malik (مالِك) which means the owner of the Final Day, and the other as Mlik (ملك) which means the king of the Final Day. In the rasm of this verse, the single word is with a superscript apostrophe conveying either use but not both at the same time — this is like the one between the emm and the enn in (الرحمن) though here, the Alif is not optionally not voiced.
"Make up your minds!" is the least thing one can expect here; is the superscript Alif in the rsam sounded as in (الرحمن) and (العالَمين) or not sounded as in (ملك)? (And indeed, where are the two supposed Alifs in (طه) in surat Taha [20:1]?)
In terms of meaning, if we go with the latter (ملك), this adds nothing special because Allah claims to be the single king of place (seven heavens and seven earths) and time in a lot of verses. The mufisroon explain away this nonevent as Him being the only king in space/place and time existence that day and that there would be no false crown wearers as it is the case in the here and now. If we go with the former (مالك), again there's nothing so special about Him owning this day when He claims to own every other day.
The same superscript apostrophe substituting Alif is found in the second verse of Alfatiha (العالمين). Again, there's nothing which justifies this departure in rasm; not meaning or otherwise. Also, (العالَمين) is said to mean the worlds by mufisroon but this cannot be supported grammatically nor morphologically. The suffix (مين- مون) denotes a personal plural male, thus you pluralise a Muslim (المسلم) at the start of a sentence as Almuslimoon (المسلمون) or in other places (i.e. genitive) as Almuslimeen (المسلمين). In both cases, this suffix denotes a plural person, not a neuter stuff like worlds. Rather, if it were meant as worlds, then it should morphologically have been put in the irregular plural form (جمع التكسير) as ( رب العَوَالِم) expressing things in lieu of a form which conclusively expresses people and persons.
(Miraculous in its sounds and letters on top of its meanings, they tell you about the Quran. How is breaking the grammatical, morphological tendencies and rules of spoken and written Arabic to achieve grandiloquent poeticism miraculous? How is using previously unknown words in the Arabic tongue in which it claims to have been revealed miraculous; both Rashidun Caliphs, Abu-Bakr and Umar, did not know what
Abba (وفاكهةَ وأبّا) [80:31] means in surat Abasa because they had never heard of it before, even though Abu-Bakr was only two years younger than Muhammad and from the same tribe and knew poetry; he has his own few poems. The precise meaning of
Abba is still unknown definitively. In the same way, the meaning of
Haseed (منها قائم وحصيد) as in [11:100] was only arrived at -- to be 'destroyed'-- by comparing it with what comes before it but the word in itself as used in the Quran is not known in the recorded Arabic language. Finally, the noun <well> is masculine even though the Quran modifies it with a feminine adjective in (وبئرٍ معطلة) [45:22])
So the direct answer to your question, Jedi, is yes there are a lot of grammatically and morphologically incongruent stuff in the Quranic rasm or written form that cannot always be reconciled with its different realisations -- there were seven authentic Qiraat before the Caliph Uthman forbade and burnt them all except one Qir'ah, thus we, Sunnis, have his rasm and compilation. My father and his father's Qira'at is Wrsh (ورش) as this is the prevalent one in Chad, whereas I have learnt the Quran in Saudi as a child on Hafs (قراءة حفص عن عاصم) and then as a pubescent boy I informally began learning to recite it on Shu'ba (قراءة شعبة عن عاصم). I had the opportunity to recite on Shu'ba upon a Syrian Qari' called (عبدالحميد بكري الطرابيشي) when he was in Riyadh between 2000 and 2004.
And yes, Zaotar kicks ass.
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P.S. I have written more but, alas, it all disappeared when I accidentally hit the backspace key. This still is updated and revised. P.P.S. I added more stuff, some is not relevant at all.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today