Did al-Tabari reject established readings in Jami' al-Bayan?

In Jami' al-Bayan, al-Tabari stops at a plurality of readings in 854 places, explaining them and giving his view, at times agreeing with the readers and at times differing from some of them. ¹ Scholars differ on how to describe his practice: was he applying a standard accepted among the scholars of the readings, or did he reject readings the community held to be sound?

Makki ibn Abi Talib quotes in al-Ibana from al-Tabari's lost book on the readings: whatever is soundly known to have been taught by the Prophet ﷺ to his community among the seven ahruf, no one may fault the one who reads it if it agrees with the script of the codex, and what departs from the script is not read, and one refrains from it and from discussing it. ² In the introduction to his commentary al-Tabari relates that when someone recited before Abu al-Aliya, he would not say "it is not as he reads" but "as for me, I read thus", and that Ibrahim al-Nakha'i said: I think your companion had heard that whoever denies one harf of it denies all of it. ²

Ahmad Khalid Babakr concludes that al-Tabari's judgements on readings rest on three pillars: agreement with the script of the codex, the agreement of most readers, and conformity with the most eloquent speech of the Arabs. ³ He agrees with the readers when two readings share a meaning, are equally well known or equally sound in the language — as when he says of Al Imran 48 that the two readings do not differ in meaning, so whoever reads either is right. ^{1 4} He rejects what one, two or three readers — sometimes four — read alone, because most readers read otherwise, whether or not that reader was later counted among the Seven or the Ten. ⁵ The thesis gives examples at al-An'am 137, Al Imran 181, al-An'am 105, al-Baqara 140 and al-A'raf 44. ^{3 5}

• Pages are PDF pages of the thesis. Al-Tabari's book on the readings is lost; its words are given here as Makki's al-Ibana quotes them, through the thesis.
• Neither the verses nor the variant readings are typed here; verses are referred to by number as the thesis names them.