Page 161 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

ARABIC PALAEOGRAPHY AND ORTHOGRAPHY IN THE QUR'AN 141

San'a' followed yet another framework.'? Likewise, the pattern used by
the Madinites differed from the Basarites; by the close of the first century
however, the Basarite conventions became ubiquitous to the extent that
even the Madlnite scholars adopted them." Later developments witnessed
the introduction of multi-coloured dots, each diacritical mark being assigned
a different colour.

Figure 10.7: Example if a Mu~bqf in the KUfic script. The diacritical dots are
multi-coloured (red, green, yellow, andapaleshade if blue). Notealso the ayah
separators and the tenth ayah marker, as discussed in Chapter 8. Courtesy if the
National Archive Museum if Yemen

iii. Parallel Usage of Two Different Diacritical Marking Schemes

Khalil bin Ahmad al-Fraheedi's diacritical scheme won rapid introduction
into non-Qur'anic texts, so for the sake of differentiation the script and dia-
critical marks reserved for masterly copies of the Qur'an were deliberately
kept different from those that were common to other books, though slowly
some calligraphers began to use the new diacritical system in the Qur'an,
however.'? I am fortunate to have a few colour pictures of the Qjir'anic

+0 ibid, p. 235.
41 ibid, p. 7.
42 Some of those calligraphers are: Ibn Muqla (d. 327 A.H.), Ibn al-Bawwab (d.
circa 413 A.H.) ... etc. In fact Ibn al-Bawwab even shied away from 'Uthman's orth-
ography. The current trend is to fall back to the early orthography, e.g. the Mushaf
printed by the King Fahd complex in Madinah [See p. 131].