Arabic Script and Reading Aids

            Arabic is a Semitic language that has twenty-eight letters and is written from right to left. There are seventeen different letter forms, and the remaining letters are distinguished by the presence and absence of dots above or below these letter forms. The letter forms change according to their position in the word, taking variant forms at the beginning, middle and end of a word. Various attempts to reform Arabic writing and render the letters more easily legible took place during the 7th and 8th centuries. They consisted mainly of adding dots to the skeletal script, or consonant pointing, to differentiate between consonants with the same basic shape (nuqaṭ al-iʿjām), and supplementary diacritical markings above and below the letters in order to make provision for short vowels (tashkīl, or nuqaṭ al-iʿrāb).

Consonantal Pointing

           The earliest Quran manuscripts, such as the Birmingham Quran folios, do not generally use consonantal pointing or diacritical markings. There are, however, some exceptions to this: consonantal pointing is frequently used for the letters bāʾ, tāʾ, thāʾand initial and medial forms ofnūn, but less frequently and not at all in other instances. The purpose appears to be to avoid confusion where there may be ambiguity about the word or it could simply be due to the fact that their use was not yet an established practice. Quran manuscripts would have been used as an aide-memoire that prompted readers in their recitation; it was assumed that readers would be able to distinguish the letters either from their knowledge of the language or their own memorisation of the Quran. In some sources, the governor of the Islamic East, Al-Ḥallāj ibn Yūsuf (d.714) has been credited with commissioning the use of dots, but there is evidence of their use from earlier in the 7th century, as we have seen in the manuscripts presented and other dated documents from the mid-7th century onwards. 

[Click on the images below to read more about the introduction of reading aids to mark consonants and vowels, and the scripts (calligraphy) used in early Quran manuscripts]