an imam?’ He replied, ‘Yes. Hamzah would articulate the hamzah and employ the kasr, and he was an imam; if you had seen him, your eyes would have delighted in his piety.’

Husayn al-Juʿfī said, ‘At times Hamzah would feel thirsty, yet he would not ask for water, out of dislike that he might chance upon someone who had recited to him.’

Ibn Fuḍayl said, ‘I do not think that Allah wards off affliction from the people of Kūfah except through Hamzah.’

Shuʿayb ibn Harb used to say to the hadith scholars, ‘Will you not ask me about the pearls? — It is the recitation of Hamzah.’

I say: A group of scholars once disapproved of Hamzah’s mode of recitation because of the pauses, the extreme elongation of vowels, his strict adherence to the written orthography, the pronounced inclination (iḍjāʿ) (1), and other matters. Yet consensus today has settled on accepting it, while some of what is attributed to it Hamzah himself did not deem permissible.

We have been informed that a man said to him, ‘Abū ʿAmārah, I saw one of your companions articulate the hamzah so forcefully that his button snapped.’

He replied, ‘I did not command them to go that far.’

It is also related from him that he said, ‘This precision has a limit; once it goes beyond that, it becomes objectionable.’

And from him: ‘The hamzah is merely a discipline; once a person has mastered and beautified it, he should ease it.’