calligraphy, orthography and diacritical marks used in the qur'an
The first and second copies of the Qur'an were written in Kufic script
at the time of the Prophet. The very basic nature of the script, without
diacritical marks, was suitable for the reciters, relators and scholars
who had learned the Qur'an by heart, since only they knew the precise pronuniciation
of the words. Others found great difficuity if they opened the Book and
tried to read correctly.
It was for this reason that at the end of the first century after Hijrah
abu al-aswad al-du'ali, 1 one of the companions of 'Ali, with the guidance
of the latter, wrote out the rules of the Arabic language and on the orders
of the Umayyad Caliph 'Abd al-Malik produced a Qura'nic text with diacritical
marks. This, to a certain extent, removed the difficulty of reading the
kufic script.
Several difficulties remained, however; the diacritical marks for vowels,
for example, were for a time only points. Instead of a fathah, a point
was placed at the beginning of the letter and, instead of kasrah, a point
below and, for a dammah, a point above at the end of a letter. This led
to ambiguity. It was not till Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi set about explaining
the maddah, i.e. the lengthening of certain words, the doubling of letters,
the diacritical marks of vowelling and the pause, that the difficulty of
reading script was finally removed.
2 Al-Suyuti,
op. cit., vol. 2, p. 171.