The plural of 'disbelievers', besides the now popular kuffār, is also kāfirūna in the Quran. In the genitive and accusative this becomes kāfirīna. Some readers read this (and ONLY this) as kēfirīna.
This is the reading of: ʾAbū ʿAmr, al-Dūrī ← al-Kisāʾī and Ruways ← Yaʿqūb.
In his al-Ḥuǧǧah fī l-Qirāʾāt al-Sabʿ, Ibn Ḫālawayh sets out to rationalize and explain the practices of the seven readers canonized by his teacher, Ibn Mujāhid. He also discusses al-Kēfirīna. Let's translate and give commentary along the way.
"As for the saying of the almighty 'wa-ḷḷāhu muḥīṭun bi-l-kāfirīna'", al-kāfirīna is read with ʾimālah or without ʾimālah whenever it is in the accusative or genitive.
So the explanation is that it is because of the meeting of four kasras within a single word"
"It is the kasrah of the fāʾ, rāʾ and yāʾ -- and the rāʾ can carry two kasras, so they pull the ʾalif, because it is quiscentent, by their strength, so they cause ʾimālah to apply to it".
So lots to unpack here. Where on earth is he getting four kasrahs from?!
Anyone keeping normal count, would arrive at two kasrahs. That of the fāʾ and that of the rāʾ. But Ibn Ḫālawayh is counting two on the rāʾ one more after the yāʾ. This 'double counting of the rāʾ' has precedent, Sībawayh in fact does something very similar.
Sībawayh observes that with ʾimālah triggered by a following i, this is blocked when there is an adjacent emphatic consonant (ṭ, ḍ, ẓ, ṣ) or uvulars (q, ġ, ḫ), e.g. ṭāʾifun never undergoes ʾimālah. He however notices this blocking effect is lifted if /r/ precedes i.
Thus while you cannot say ṭēʾif, you CAN say ṭēriq. He explains this as being because the rāʾ counts as a 'doubled' consonant, and thus carries twice as many kasrahs, essentially (/ṭāririq/ > [ṭēririq]). Ibn Ḫalawayh repurposes this argument to explain al-kēfirīna.
It is worth noting that Sībawayh never uses this argument. To him even al-kēfirūna and kēfir are perfectly acceptable applications of imālah.
But this only puts us at three kasrahs /al-kāfiririyna/, not four!
The last one is an interesting trick. He interprets long ī not as /iy/ with a yāʾ that doesn't carry a vowel, but as /iyi/. I am not aware of any grammarian that supports such an analysis. It seems to be an innovation of Ibn Ḫalawayh designed to explain this reading idiosyncrasy
However, he is not yet out of the woods. And he realizes this himself. He continues: "If one were to say: it is necessary on this bases to also apply ʾimālah to aš-šākirīna and al-ǧabbārīna then say: no that is not necessary, and the reasons for it are threefold:"
"The first of them is the assimilation that is in these two, words. This is a practical use, and ʾimālah is also a practical use, and two practical uses do not join in a single word."
Ibn Ḫālawayh is referring here to the assimilation of the definite article and ...
and I think the meeting of two bāʾs in al-ǧabbārīn which 'assimilation' so a single bāʾwith a šaddah.
This explanation however *only* explains these two words, and many other words that would also qualify for the ʾimālah are simply ignored.
For example šākirīna (Q7:17) also occurs without the definite article, and thus without the assimilation. But one may also include al-mākirīna (Q8:30), and ḥāširīna (Q7:111). The reasoning is thus ad hoc and not altogher convincing. He continues with the second reason:
"The next reason is that these two words are infrequent in number in the Quran, and not as frequent as the word al-kāfirīna, so their ʾimālah is removed."
This argument is, at least, factually correct. al-Kāfirīna is much more common than any other word of this shape.
This concept of higher frequency causing certain forms to behave irregularly is deeply ingrained in Arabic grammatical thought. It is also an intuition frequently shared by non-linguist speakers that it may explain irregularities of certain words.
It is true that frequent words are more likely to be irregular than infrequent words. But the reason is *not* that they are more likely to undergo change. It is that they are *less* likely to undergo change. You may forget irregularities that you never would in frequent ones.
For example, English still has an ancient s~r alternation in "was" but "were", but has lost it in "lose" and "lost" (compare Dutch verliezen, verloren) (you can still see a trace of it in forlorn". "to be" is one of the most common verbs there is, so kept the irregularity.
This is not really obviously an example of an irregularity that was kept around since ancient times, while it was deleted elsewhere. Rather al-Kēfirīna seems to be an irregular innovation.
Finally, we can move onto the third argument:
"And the third is that the šīn, ǧīm and yāʾ are all pronounce with the middle of the tongue and the middle of the palate. When there are two consonant pronounced at the place of articulation of the yāʾ, they hate to applying ʾimālah to it just like the hate it in the yāʾ."
Once again, this argument exclusively explains the two example words that Ibn Ḫālawayh himself picked. Had he picked al-mākirīna, this same argument would simply not have worked. It is therefore ad hoc, and doesn't solve the problems with his initial explanation.
We therefore don't come to any deeper understanding from Ibn Ḫālawayh's work as to why it is specifically this word that undergoes ʾImālah among some of the Quranic reading traditions. But the discussion is interesting because it *tries* to find an explanation for this behaviour
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