Qaf: More Pronunciations & A Bit of Fiqh

A reader commented that qaf is also sometimes pronounced jaf in the Gulf. In my original post, I mentioned that the only person I had ever heard use this was my mother-in-law, whose authentic Bani Hassan dialect will probably become extinct during my lifetime. More interestingly, the reader commented that the qaf is also sometimes pronounced as yaf in the Gulf. As noted in The Avatars of Jeem, Gulf Arabs often pronounce jeem as yeem, so pronouncing qaf as yaf after already pronouncing it jaf seems like a reasonable extension.

The original article also neglected to mention that many people from Sudan pronounce qaf as ghaf. For example, they will refer to the second call of prayer as the ighama (where gh is the sound found in, "Baghdad").

In the Shafi'i school, pronouncing every letter of the fatiha is required. If a person mispronounces any letter of the fatiha while being able to pronounce it properly (i.e. according to the pronunciation mandated by Qur'anic Arabic), their prayer is invalid. Ibn Hajar holds that this applies to all letters including the Qur'anic qaf. Ramli, on the other hand, makes an exception to what the fuqaha call qaf al-3arab, or gaf: according to him, pronouncing the qaf in the fatiha this way would not invalidate the prayer, though it would be disliked (makruh). Based on this, Habib Ali once said that it would be better for the Sudanese to recite the qaf as gaf in prayer rather than attempting to recite it properly only for it to come out as ghaf. The reason is because the verse اهدنا الصراط المستقيم (Tr. "Clarify for us the straight path"), when pronounced with gaf, does not change in meaning. However, when pronounced with ghaf, the meaning is altered incredibly: instead of the requested path being the straight one, it becomes the gloomy (mustagheem) one.