reynolds-the-quran-in-its-historical-context-2

148 Gerd-R. PuinThe orthography ofthe Standard.Text is full of inconsistencies, as if they became.petrified at a time when an orthographic reform had started but had not yet become . •effective in the whole Qur'an. Of course, Muslim scholars like Ibn Abi Dawildal-Sijistiini (d. 316/928), al-Diini (d. 444/1052), and later Ibn al-Jazari .(d. 833/1429) and al-Suyi1ti (d. 91111505), or even modem scholars like AI Imam,were aware of this situation, and they wrote down eclectic observations on theQur' anic orthography of this or that word in this or that verse. Although the intentionof those old authorities might have been to limit the extent of variant writings(and readings) they were not able to realize the dynamic development of Arabicorthography as a process of accumulation and growing precision in the scripturalrendering. Their theory about the defective writing of words was to see thephenomenon as a convention of the scribes in order to make the script ·~shorter"-to take away something "superfluous (zii 'id)," to write it "defectively I badhf"- which tacitly implies that the plene writing according to the rules of Classical ·Arabic were the original "mother of the book I umm al-kitiib" (Q 13:39; 43:4) in··heaven, on the "preserved tablet I law/:1 mabfo?" (Q 85:22).However, the orthographic variants in a corpus which has treasured up so many ·pre-classical elements enable us to discover many details of their orthographichistory- all the more so if we take the early manuscripts of the Qur'an into·account, because, for lack of a critical edition of the Qur'an, we cannot rightly be ·sure that the Standard Text is really the "rasm 'Uthmiinf", i.e. the earliest possible .shape of the text. ·Therefore, the idea of this chapter is not to look back from the orthography of ··Classical (or modem) Arabic which has become (mostly) explicit or plene, but on ·•the contrary to follow up the steady enrichment of the Arabic script (as encounteredin the earliest manuscripts) by the invention or application of new signs and devices.Generally and until today there has been no need for a differentiation in the .rasm between the vocalizations of the a/if at the outset of a word: !) 'akhim, .!J-1 .'ukhtun, tjJ-1 'ikhwatun. This is the normal or evident case for those who arefamiliar with the vocabulary and the grammar of Arabic. Yet the Qur' an is not an"ordinary" text! Naturally, and in spite of its complicated structure, the text had tobe represented in script on the one hand, but disambiguated on the other, if thewritten shape was -or became in the course of time- misleading.An important instrument for the definition of a vowel's quality was the insertionof matres ledionis, i.e. (mainly) ofthe vowel letters wiiw andyii ',next to thea/if, in order to specify the a/if's phonetic quality. Of course, their use was alreadycommon for the definition of the long vowels