Caught a case of #hafsonormativity in my recent article on "the morphosyntax of objects to participles in the qurʾān". I don't discuss Q33:40, while I should have. The minority reading of ʿĀṣim ḫātama n-nabiyyīna "the seal of the prophets" doesn't apply, but other readings do.

All other readers read ḫātima n-nabiyyīna, with an active participle of the verb ḫatama "to seal", rather than the noun ḫātam "seal". As I show in my article, the exact interpretation of such an active participle can actually be ambiguous...

The active participle can have the same meaning as the imperfect (yafʿalu) so present/future imperfect, or the meaning of nominalized perfect/past (allaḏī faʿala). Thus ḫātima n-nabiyyīna is potentially "will seal the prophets" or "the one who sealed the prophets"

In my article I present an interesting heuristic to "test" which of these two meanings is intended. As such readings can be disambiguated in several ways, although in this case one of the two readings would affect the rasm.

If the active participle is takes tanwīn, the understanding is unambiguously imperfect خاتما النبين **ḫātiman-i n-nabiyyīna "he will be the sealer of the prophets". This would influence the rasm, so the reading clearly isn't intended (nor reported as šāḏḏ here).

The fact that for كل نفس ذايقه الموت there is a (non-canonical) reading with tanwīn confirms that (at least this reader) understood these verse as "each soul will taste death" rather than the theologically odd "each soul is one who has tasted death".

The other way around, if one finds that a verse is read as a perfect rather than an active participle, then we can be sure that (at least to that reader) the verse was understood as past tense. As is the case in Q6:96, coincidentally for the same non-canonical reader.

As it turns out for Q33:40 there is also such a variant reading! Ibn Masʿūd is said to have read wa-lākin nabiyyan ḫatama n-nabiyyīna "But [Muhammad] is a prophet who has sealed the prophets", clearly pointing to the past tense understanding.

I know why I missed this: I used the Leeds corpus to find these constructions. But since the Leeds corpus is based on Ḥafṣ, this verse did not show up. Luckily, it actually makes my case stronger! The article is Open Access, check it out here: https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/fgad029…

Little addition worth making: Ibn Ḫālawayh actually uses the exact same argument (leaning on Ibn Masʿūd's reading) in favour of the perfective understanding of the participle!

Not finding it in Leslau though...