Some Peculiarities of the Ancient Writing

Numerous copies of the Qur'an were made after the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, and the writers of these manuscripts strictly observed the autography of the 'Uthmanic Qur'an. There are, compared to the usual Arabic spelling, some peculiarities. Here are a few of them, only concerning the letters alif, yti, WtiW, by way of examples: [For more examples see Kamal, op. cit., pp.47-9; a list of these peculiarities has been provided by M. Hamidullah: 'Orthographical Peculiarities in the text of the Qur'an, in: Islamic Order, 3 (4), 1981, pp.72-86.]

• The letter alif is often written on top of a letter instead of afterit, e.g XXX

• The letter ya (or alif) of the word is omitted, e.g.: XXX

• Some words have the letter waw in place of alif, e.g.: XXX