robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)

To move toward a fuller answer to the question of what the Qur'an may have been originally, one must
know a bit about how the Arabic alphabet works. Like Hebrew, Arabic does not have letters for short
vowels (it does for long ones). Nor does it have letters for certain consonants. Many Arabic letters are
identical to one another in appearance except for their diacritical marks—that is, the dots that appear
above or below the character. In fact, twenty-two of the twenty-eight letters in the Arabic alphabet in
some or all forms depend on diacritical marks to distinguish them from at least one other letter.
The Arabic letter ra ( ), for example, is identical to the letter zay ( ), except that the zay carries a
dot above it. The letter sin ( ) looks exactly the same as shin ( ), except that the latter features three
dots above the character. One symbol could be three different letters: ba ( ) with a dot under it, ta (
) with two dots above it, and tha ( ) with three dots above it; nun ( ) is also quite similar in form.
Obviously, these similarities can make for enormous differences in meaning.
As such, diacritical marks are essential to being able to make sense of the Qur'an or any other Arabic
text. Unfortunately, the earliest manuscripts of the Qur'an do not contain most diacritical marks. A scholar
of hadiths named Abu Nasr Yahya ibn Abi Kathir al-Yamami (d. 749) recalled: “The Qur'an was kept free
[of diacritical marks] in mushaf [the original copies]. The first thing people have introduced in it is the
dotting at the letter ba ( ) and the letter ta ( ), maintaining that there is no sin in this, for this
illuminates the Qur'an.” 5 Abu Nasr did not say when these marks began to be introduced, but the fragments
of Qur'anic manuscripts that many scholars date to the first century of the Arabian conquests have only
rudimentary diacritical marks. Some manuscripts distinguish one set of identical letters from another—ta
( ) from (ba ( ), or fa ( ) from qaf ( )—but they leave the other sets of identical letters
indistinguishable. Nor are all the earliest manuscripts consistent in the sets of identical letters they choose
to distinguish from one another. 6