The Arabic Language

Qurʾān
itself documents this shift from recitation to 
collected text. The current term 
qurʾān
in the early suras (possibly borrowed from 
Syriac 
qeryānā
‘recitation’) is replaced increasingly often in the later suras with 
the term 
kitāb
‘book’.
Both Islamic tradition and scholars agree that there was no complete collec
-
tion of the revelation during the Prophet’s lifetime, but there were fragments 
of all kinds of material, on which parts of the messages were recorded. The 
actual collection of all these fragments took place after the death of the Prophet. 
According to tradition, the third caliph, ʿUṯmān (r. 25/644–35/656), ordered the 
establishment of an authoritative codex of the 
Qurʾān
. He entrusted this edition 
to Muḥammad’s scribe Zayd, who had already been involved in the recording of 
the text during the Prophet’s lifetime. When the work was finished, copies of the 
codex were sent to the important centres of the Islamic empire, where they were 
to replace all existing alternative readings. Acceptance of this text, usually called 
al-Muṣḥaf
, was slow, and non-canonical variants continued to be transmitted; but 
eventually, by the end of the second century of the Hijra, the ʿUṯmānic text had 
become the basis for religious teaching and recitation almost everywhere. In the 
first grammatical treatise of Arabic, Sībawayhi’s (d. 177/793?) 
Kitāb
, all deviations 
from the consonantal text of the codex are rejected and only some divergence 
in the vocalisation of the text is allowed. Around the variant readings (
qirāʾāt
), a 
massive literature arose that, at the same time, contributed to the linguistic study 
of the text and the language of the 
Qurʾān
.
Apart from the problems of unification encountered during the codification 
of the text, the main problem confronting Zayd ibn Ṯābit and his committee of 
text editors was the ambiguity of the Arabic script. The type of script that the 

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The Development of Classical Arabic 
63
Meccan traders had at their disposal was still a primitive one. Basically, there 
were two problems connected with this primitive form of the Arabic alphabet. In 
the first place, there were as yet no diacritic dots to distinguish between certain 
phonemes, and many of the letters of the alphabet indicated two or even more 
phonemes, in the case of 
sīn
/
šīn
, 
ṣād
/
ḍād
, 
bāʾ
/
tāʾ
/
ṯāʾ
/
nūn
/
yāʾ
, 
fāʾ
/
qāf
, 
dāl
/
ḏāl
, 
rāʾ
/
zāy
, 
ṭāʾ
/
ḏ̣āʾ
. This was the heritage of the Nabataean script that had been the 
model for the earliest form of Arabic script and that did not contain all the Arabic 
phonemes. The second problem was connected with a general trait of all Semitic 
scripts (except Ethiopian), namely, the fact that these scripts do not indicate the 
short vowels. In the case of the Nabataean model, even many of the long vowels 
were written defectively (cf. above, pp. 32f.). The former problem may already 
have been solved in pre-Islamic times. There are some indications that, very early 
on, scribes had used diacritic dots to distinguish between homographs. They may 
have borrowed this device from a Syriac model, since in the Syriac script dots are 
used to distinguish between allophonic variants of phonemes. Alternatively, they 
may also have inherited this method from Nabataean script, which used dots to 
distinguish between characters that looked alike (Nehmé 2010).
The notation of the short vowels was an altogether more complicated problem. 
During the first century of Islam, when people started to collect and record the 
fragments of the Qurʾānic revelation, the need for a uniform and unambiguous 
system for the short vowels made itself felt. Various grammarians, among them 
the legendary ‘inventor’ of grammar, ʾAbū l-ʾAswad ad-Duʾalī (d. 69/688?), are 
credited with the introduction of a system of (coloured) dots below and above the 
letters to indicate the three short vowels. In the version of the tradition that is 
reported by Ibn al-ʾAnbārī, ʾAbū l-ʾAswad gives a scribe the following instruction:
When I open my lips, put one dot above the letter, and when I press them together 
put a dot next to the letter, and when I draw them apart put a dot beneath the letter, 
and when I make a humming sound after one of these vowels, put two dots. (