The late eighteenth century is often depicted as the acceleration of Islam’s “modernist reform,” driven by such changes as the advent of print capitalism, colonial restructuring, and emergence of the modern state. Although this reform process has often been characterized by changes in jurisprudence (fiqh), particularly the rejection of the four Sunni legal schools in favor of scriptural sources of authority like the Qur’an and hadith, scholars of North Africa have begun to offer nuance to this picture by foregrounding such factors as the retrenchment of Maliki traditionalism, reform of educational methods, and critiques of localized Sufi practices (Terem 2014). In this paper I press for a further expansion in the study of Islamic “reform” by focusing on two less-examined fields of Islamic scholarship, namely tajwid and the qira’at, “practical” disciplines which provide and elaborate rules for the vocal performance or recitation of the Qur’anic text. In order to investigate how such fields might have been impacted by parallel reformist agendas, I offer an ethnographic reading of scholarly biographies (tarajim) of Moroccan qira’at scholars spanning roughly the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in order to trace the emergence and consolidation of a distinct “Moroccan school” (madrasa maghribiyya) of qira’at study, spurred by the advent of new handwritten textual genres, shifting networks of scholarly travel, and their articulation with the powers of the precolonial ‘Alawi state. Based on this historical reconstruction, I question two common “rupture” narratives regarding modern Islam and Moroccan history. First, I argue that the centrality of handwritten texts to the consolidation of a “Moroccan school” of recitation studies destabilizes the print revolution as a turning point in Islam’s “objectification.” Secondly, while many historical narratives present the French Protectorate as having “produced” the Moroccan nation, the school’s emergence suggests that Morocco was already coalescing into what sound scholar Brandon LaBelle calls an “acoustic territory” well before colonial restructuring. In conclusion, I suggest that by turning to “non-discursive” Islamic disciplines like tajwid and the qira’at we might imagine new approaches to the topic of “reform” generally, ones situated in shifting relations among vocal practice, listening, and textual reproduction.