The Arabic Language

5.2 The development of orthography
The first concern of Islamic scholars was to codify the texts with which they 
worked. Even though oral transmission continued to remain an essential compo
-
nent of Islamic culture, the risk of major discrepancies in the transmission became 
too large to ignore. The need for an authoritative text was imperative above all in 
the case of the Revealed Book. Clearly, the central government had a major stake 
in the acceptance of a uniform Book throughout the empire as the basis for all 
religious and political activities.
The codification of the 
Qurʾān
was a crucial moment in the development of a 
written standard for the Arabic language. On a practical level, the writing down 
of the text involved all kinds of decisions concerning the orthography of the 
Arabic script and the elaboration of a number of conventions to make writing 
less ambiguous and more manageable than it had been in the 
Jāhiliyya
. We have 
seen above (Chapter 3) that writing was not unknown in the peninsula in the 
pre-Islamic period. But, for religious reasons, early Islamic sources emphasised, 
perhaps even exaggerated, the illiteracy of the Prophet and, by extension, of the 
entire Jāhilī society. The Prophet had been an 
ʾummī
, someone who could not read 
nor write, and this was what made the revelation of the 
Qurʾān
and his recitation 
of the text a miracle.
There are clear indications that as early as the sixth century writing was fairly 
common in the urban centres of the peninsula, in Mecca and to a lesser degree in 
Medina. In the commercial society that was Mecca, businessmen must have had 
at their disposal various means of recording their transactions. There are refer
-
ences to treaties being written down and preserved in the Kaʿba in Mecca. Even 
the 
rāwī
s, the transmitters of poetry, sometimes relied on written notes, although 
they recited the poems entrusted to them orally. In the 
Qurʾān
, we find the reflec-
tion of a society in which writing for commercial purposes was well established. 
In the second sura we find, for instance, detailed stipulations on the settlement 
of debts that include the exact writing down of the terms (
Q
2/282):
O you believers, when you take a loan among you for a certain period of time, write 
it down and let a scribe write it down fairly between you, and let no scribe refuse 
to write as God has taught him and let him write and the debtor dictate (
yā ʾayyuhā 
llaḏīna ʾāmanū ʾiḏā tadāyantum bi-daynin ʾilā ʾajalin musamman fa-ktubūhu wa-l-yaktub 
baynakum kātibun bi-l-ʿadli wa-lā yaʾba kātibun ʾan yaktuba kamā ʿallamahu llāhu fa-l-
yaktub wa-l-yumlili llaḏī ʿalayhi l-ḥaqqu
).

---

62
The Arabic Language
In the biography of the Prophet, there are many references to his using scribes 
for his correspondence with the Arab tribes and for the writing of treaties, for 
instance, the famous treaty with the settlements in North Arabia. This treaty, 
which was signed in the course of the expedition to Tabūk in year 9 of the Hijra, 
laid down for the first time the relations between Muslims and people of other 
religions. In the account preserved by the historians, the scribe and the witnesses 
are mentioned, as well as the fact that the Prophet signed it with his fingernail (cf. 
al-Wāqidī, 
Maġāzī
, III, ed. Marsden Jones, London, 1966, 1,025ff.). This last detail is 
probably added to underscore the fact that the Prophet himself could not write.
The Prophet may well have been illiterate, but there were scribes on whom 
he could rely, just as his fellow Meccans used scribes in the management of their 
affairs. In the beginning, the revelation consisted of short messages, which the 
Prophet brought to the believers and which could be committed to memory 
easily. But very soon, the messages grew longer and longer, and it became essen
-
tial to have a written aid to memory, while the recitation of the text continued to 
take place orally. Tradition has preserved the names of several scribes to whom 
Muḥammad dictated the messages, chief among them being Zayd ibn Ṯābit (d. 
45/665). The text of the