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In the early Arabic manuscripts that survive today (physical manuscripts dated 7th and 8th centuries AD), one finds dots but "putting dots was in no case compulsory".¹ The very earliest manuscripts have some consonantal diacritics, though use them only sparingly.² Signs indicating short vowels and the hamza are largely absent from Arabic orthography until the 2nd to 8th century. One might assume that scribes would write these few diacritics in the most textually ambiguous places of the rasm, so as to make the Arabic text easier to read. However, many scholars have noticed that this is not the case. By focusing on the few diacritics that do appear in early manuscripts, Adam Bursi "situates early Qurʾān manuscripts within the context of other Arabic documents of the first/seventh century that exhibit similarly infrequent diacritics. Shared patterns in the usages of diacritics indicate that early Qurʾān manuscripts were produced by scribes relying upon very similar orthographic traditions to those that produced Arabic papyri and inscriptions of the first/seventh century." He concludes that Quranic scribes "neither 'left out' diacritics to leave the text open, nor 'added' more to clarify it, but in most cases simply wrote diacritics where they were accustomed to writing them by habit or convention."³

Rasm means 'drawing', 'outline', or 'pattern' in Arabic. When speaking of the Qur'an, it stands for the basic text made of the 18 letters without the Arabic diacritics which mark vowels (taškīl) and disambiguate consonants (ʾiʿjām).

Letters

The rasm is the oldest part of the Arabic script; it has 18 elements, excluding the ligature of lām and alif. When isolated and in the final position, the 18 letters are visually distinct. However, in the initial and medial positions, certain letters that are distinct otherwise are not differentiated visually. This results in only 15 visually distinct glyphs each in the initial and medial positions.

• ^a This character may not display correctly in some fonts. The dot should not appear in all four positional forms and the initial and medial forms should join with following character. In other words the initial and medial forms should look exactly like those of a dotless bāʾ while the isolated and final forms should look like those of a dotless nūn.
• ^b There is no hamzah in rasm writing, including hamzah-on-the-line (i.e., hamzah between letters).

At the time when the ʾiʿjām was optional, letters deliberately lacking the points of ʾiʿjām: ⟨ح⟩ /ħ/, ⟨د⟩ /d/, ⟨ر⟩ /r/, ⟨س⟩ /s/, ⟨ص⟩ /sˤ/, ⟨ط⟩ /tˤ/, ⟨ع⟩ /ʕ/, ⟨ل⟩ /l/, ⟨ه⟩ /h/ — could be marked with a small v-shaped sign above or below the letter, or a semicircle, or a miniature of the letter itself (e.g. a small س‎ to indicate that the letter in question is س‎ and not ش‎), or one or several subscript dots, or a superscript hamza, or a superscript stroke.⁴ These signs, collectively known as ‘alāmātu-l-ihmāl, are still occasionally used in modern Arabic calligraphy, either for their original purpose (i.e. marking letters without ʾiʿjām), or often as purely decorative space-fillers. The small ک‎ above the kāf in its final and isolated forms ⟨ك  ـك⟩ was originally ‘alāmātu-l-ihmāl, but became a permanent part of the letter. Previously this sign could also appear above the medial form of kāf, instead of the stroke on its ascender.⁵

Examples

Among the historical examples of rasm script are the Kufic Blue Qur'an and the Samarkand Qurʾan. The latter is written almost entirely in Kufic rasm.

The following is an example of rasm from Surah Al-A'raf (7), āyah 86 and 87, in the Samarkand Qur'an, and its digital equivalent rasm, rasm with normal spacing, and then fully vocalized with all diacretics:

Digital examples

Compare the Basmala (Arabic: بَسْمَلَة), the beginning verse of the Qurʾān with all diacritics and with the rasm only. Note that when rasm is written with spaces, spaces do not only occur between words. Within a word, spaces also appear between adjacent letters that are not connected, and this type of rasm is old and not used lately.

^c. The sentence may not display correctly in some fonts. It appears as it should if the full Arabic character set from the Arial font is installed; or one of the SIL International⁶ fonts Scheherazade⁷ or Lateef;⁸ or Katibeh.⁹

Examples of Common Phrases

See also

• Kufic
• Abjad numerals
• History of the Arabic alphabet
• Qiraʾat
• Scriptio continua, an analogous concept in the Latin script where all spaces and other punctuations is omitted.
• Decimal separator
• Modern Arabic mathematical notation
• Book Pahlavi, an Iranian script with similar graphemic convergence.

External links

• Some pages from the famous Saint Petersburg-Samerkand-Tashkent Koran. The fourth to seventh images are written in the Kufic script
• A page in the earliest script Archived 2020-10-20 at the Wayback Machine, known as ma'il

References

1. "What Are Those Few Dots for? Thoughts on the Orthography of the Qurra Papyri (709–710), the Khurasan Parchments (755–777) and the Inscription of the Jerusalem Dome of the Rock (692)", by Andreas Kaplony, year 2008 in journal Arabica volume 55 pages 91–101. https://www.academia.edu/10856768/What_Are_Those_Few_Dots_For_Thoughts_on_the_Orthography_of_the_Qurra_Papyri_709-710_the_Khurasan_Parchments_755-777_and_the_Inscription_of_the_Jerusalem_Dome_of_the_Rock_692_ ↩

2. Dutton, Yasin (2000). "Red Dots, Green Dots, Yellow Dots and Blue: Some Reflections on the Vocalisation of Early Qur'anic Manuscripts (Part II)". Journal of Qur'anic Studies. 2 (1): 1–24. doi:10.3366/jqs.2000.2.1.1. JSTOR 25727969. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25727969 ↩

3. Bursi, Adam (2018). "Connecting the Dots: Diacritics Scribal Culture, and the Quran". Journal of the International Qur'anic Studies Association. 3: 111. doi:10.5913/jiqsa.3.2018.a005. hdl:1874/389663. JSTOR 10.5913/jiqsa.3.2018.a005. S2CID 216776083. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5913/jiqsa.3.2018.a005 ↩

4. Gacek, Adam (2009). "Unpointed letters". Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers. BRILL. p. 286. ISBN 978-90-04-17036-0. 978-90-04-17036-0 ↩

5. Gacek, Adam (1989). "Technical Practices and Recommendations Recorded by Classical and Post-Classical Arabic Scholars Concerning the Copying and Correction of Manuscripts" (PDF). In Déroche, François (ed.). Les manuscrits du Moyen-Orient: essais de codicologie et de paléographie. Actes du colloque d'Istanbul (Istanbul 26–29 mai 1986). p. 57 (§8. Diacritical marks and vowelisation). http://www.islamicmanuscripts.info/reference/books/Deroche-1989-MMO/MMO-1989-051-060-Gacek.pdf ↩

6. "Arabic Fonts". software.sil.org. 2 October 2014. Retrieved 7 March 2020. https://software.sil.org/arabicfonts/ ↩

7. "Google Fonts: Scheherazade". Google Fonts. Archived from the original on 2020-03-19. Retrieved 2020-03-07. https://web.archive.org/web/20200319114703/https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Scheherazade ↩

8. "Google Fonts: Lateef". Google Fonts. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lateef ↩

9. "Google Fonts: Katibeh". Google Fonts. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Katibeh ↩