Page 150 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

130 THE HISTORY OF THE QUR'ANIC TEXT

In some languages certain characters enjoy dual functions; the letters
i and u were used as both vowels and consonants in Latin," with the con-
sonantal i being pronounced as v' inyes. In some texts the consonantal i
is written asj. Again in Latin, the letter bwas pronounced 'p' if followed
by s (e.g abstuli = apstuli), otherwise it was akin to the English 'b'."
Interestingly, the letterj came into existence only recently (c. 16th or 17th
century), long after the invention of the printing press." In German we
have vowels which are modified by the umlaut sign, e.g a, 0, u, which
were originally spelled ae, oe, ue respectively? The letter bis pronounced
either as 'b' in ball(when initial) or as 'p' in tap(when being last in a word
or syllable), while dis pronounced either as 'd' or 't'. The letter g can elicit
six different sounds according to the local dialect.
The same phenomenon exists in Arabic. Some tribes would pronounce
the word .r (~attii) as c? ('attii), and .kIp" (.;ira() as .kIf" (sira(), etc., and this
was the root cause of many of the known variants in recitation. Similarly
the letters \, ), '-? have the dual function of consonant and vowel, as in
Latin. The question of how early Arab writers and copyists used these
three letters requires special attention. Their methods, though puzzling
to us now, were straightforward enough to them.
From this brief introduction, let us delve into the system of Arabic
orthography during the early centuries of Islam.

1. Writing Styles During the Time if the Prophet

In Madinah the Prophet had an enormous number of scribes originating
from various tribes and localities, accustomed to different dialectsand spelling
conventions. For example, Yahya says that he witnessed a letter dictated by
the Prophet to Khalid b. Sa'td b. al-'~ which contained a few peculiarities:
0\5" (kana) was written 0§ (kawana), and.r (~attii) was spelled l::>-.6 Another
document, handed by the Prophet to Razin bin Anas as-Sulami, also spelled
0\5" as 0§.7 The use of doubley (-;-,!), which has long since been contracted
into a singley, is evident in ~~8 and Jd:- (of course without skeletal dots)

2 E1.. Moreland and R.M. Fleischer, Latin: An Intensive Course, p. 1.
3 ibid, p. 2.
4 "How Was Jesus Spelled?", Biblical Archaeology Review, MayIJune 2000, vol. 26,
no. 3, p. 66.
5 Harper'S Modern German Grammar, London, 1960, pp. ix-xvi.
6 For details see Ibn Abi Dawud, al-MafiiJ}i/, p. 104.
7 ibid, p. 105.
8 Qur'an 51:47.