Writing

Now we know that nowadays Qur'ans are printed on machines

in such numbers that it is hard to imagine a muslim household without a copy of their own.

But it wasn't always like that.

Once upon a time, in the early days of Islam, Qur'ans in book form were really quite rare objects.

For one thing they had to be written out by hand,

and not a lot of people could read and write.

For another thing, they hadn't yet learned how to make paper,

so they had to be written out on vellum or parchment,

animal skins that had been scraped clean of blood and hair

and soaked and stretched flat on a wooden frame

so that they dried as thin sheets on which the words could be written.

And the way that the words were written in the earliest texts

was also quite different from what we are familiar with today.

The Arabic script in its early form was quite primitive compared to what we are used to,

with no dots to distinguish letters from each other, or marks to show the vowels being used.

The texts were really just to help keep the memory of the person reciting the Qur'an on track.

The earliest texts were probably mostly written in a script known as Hijazi,

like the ancient pages recently discovered in Birmingham,

though other simple scripts were also used at the time,

as can be seen from those of Muhammad's various letters to foreign rulers that survive.

But over the years of the Umayyad Caliphate a special script known as Kufic was developed

to distinguish the text of the Message from other writings.

With the use of Kufic the letters became extended,

sometimes to an extraordinary degree,

and the page shape was soon changed from portrait to landscape to accommodate this.

Over this first 100 years systems were also developed to try to find ways to define pronunciation more precisely through the script,

using dots of different colours to highlight the variant readings traced back to different companions

and to distinguish between long and short vowels, as opposed to defining the different consonants as we are used to now.

Some attempts were made to distinguish the consonants,

but as Kufic was developed over the 500 years of the Abbasid Caliphate, tastes in calligraphy changed.

At first the text was simplified to an extreme, with all decoration and letter markings removed

and sometimes pages contained no more than three or four lines with a handful of words in each.

This made the texts beautiful but quite difficult to read,

and so new scripts were developed in an attempt to combine beauty with clarity and legibility.

In the eastern part of the muslim world, the scripts were condensed into what is known as Eastern Kufic,

while in the west another style was developed in North Africa and Andalusia known as Maghribi,

which is still used in the maghrib today.

With the change of scripts, the page format also began to revert to portrait from landscape, and more decorative flourishes were introduced,

and with the introduction of paper rather than parchment books became less expensive and many more people learned how to read.

And with that, even more new scripts were developed

that can still be seen in printed Qur'an's now.

These scripts that developed after the end of the Abbasid Caliphate take six main classical styles.

They are Muhaqqaq,

an elegant script that quickly took over from Kufic as the style of choice for the finest Qur'ans,

as well as Thuluth, Rayhani, Naskh, Riqa', and Tawqi', which were also used,

especially to distinguish Surah headings and the like.

At the same time, these later Qur'ans were decorated with much more freedom,

the finest work using lapis lazuli and gold in complex arabesques.

But from the finest calligraphy to the much simpler texts used in mosques and houses across the muslim world,

all were written out painstakingly by hand until comparatively recently.

Of course, nowadays, we all benefit from an abundance of Qur'ans,

printed in their thousands, and often distributed freely,

and the Arabic scripts continue to change and develop,

only now mainly through the use of computers.

But whether produced using rare and precious materials, through the skills of great craftsmen and artists,

or manufactured on a printing press with computerised text on cheap paper,

what matters is not the shape of the text, but the fact that the written words represent God's Words as they were spoken long ago by Muhammad the Messenger