Page 145 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

THE HISTORY OF ARABIC PALAEOGRAPHY 125

iv. The Emergence of Various Scripts and
the Issue of Dating Kufic Mushafs

Stretching from Azerbaijan and Armenia in the north to Yemen in the south,
to Libya and Egypt in the west and Iran in the east, the territories of the
Islamic state received communications from the central government in
Madinah in Arabic." A rapid evolution of the Arabic script followed, such
that we find angular and cursive (i.e. non-rectilinear) characters developing
alongside the Hejazi script at a very early stage. For instance, the tombstone
of al-Hajri (Figure 9.11), dated 31 A.H., is classified by some as Kufic'"
(angular), and the papyrus dated 22 A.H. (preserved at the Austrian National
Library, Figure 10.3) is in cursive. The subject of Arabic scripts is rather
large and beyond the scope of this work, but as certain Orientalists have
created confusion regarding Kufic Qur'ans, I will present examples of this
particular script.

1. Tombstone from Aswan (southern Egypt) with an inscription dated 31
A.H. 32 Prof Ahmad considers it the earliest dated Kufic inscription.l"

30 See al-A'zami, "Nash'at al-Kitaba al-Fiqhiyya", Dirdsdt, University of Riyad, 1398
(1978), ii/2: 13-24.
31 Though I use the term 'Kufic' here and elsewhere, as employed in academic circles,
I personally have reservations about this label. However, I do agree with the following,
The earliest scholar to write in the field of Mushaf calligraphy, an-Nadim, lists more
than a dozen styles of script (rasm ai-khat) of which Ktific is but one. Perhaps it is difficult
now to define the distinguishing characteristics of each of these calligraphic styles, but
it appears that modern academia, by lumping all these styles erroneously under the
'Kufic' umbrella, has achieved simplification but lost all accuracy [See A. al-MunI£,
Duiisa Fanniya li MUf~af Mubakkir, Riyad, 1418 (1998), pp. 41-42]. In the opinion of
Yusuf Dhunnun, the term 'Kilfic' is currently used to denote (incorrectly) all angular
scripts that evolved from the base script al:JalIl [ibid, p. 42J. See also N. Abbott, The
Rise of theNorth Arabic Script, p. 16.
32 ibid,p. 69; also S. al-Munaggid, Etudes De Paleographie Arabe, p. 40.
33 A. 'Abdur-Razzaq Ahmad, "Nash'at al-Khat al-'Arabi wa Tatawwurahu 'Ala al-
Masahif'", Masiihif $an'a', p. 32 (Arabic section). The script certainly looks angular but
I would rather not call it Kufic. The cities of Kufa and Basra were founded in Iraq
quite early on in the history of Islam; Kufa itself was founded in 17 A.H./638 C.E. by
Sa'd b. AbI Waqqas. It seems unlikely that a city, which was built from scratch, could
have established a popular script named after it (i.e. Kufic), exported it as far as southern
Egypt and attracted followers such as the inscriber of this tombstone, within the span
of only 14 years!