In tracing the origin of the vowel-marks and the diacritical signs, as we may now call them, in the first instance of the Cufic alphabet, we will follow Ibn K͟hallikān, whose information on the subject seems the most intelligible and self-consistent that has reached us. In his celebrated biographical dictionary, he relates that Ziyād, a natural brother of the first Umaiyah K͟halīfah Muʿāwiyah, and then Governor of the two ʿIrāqs, directed Abū Aswad ad-Duʾilī, one of the most eminent of the Tābiʿūn, to compose something to serve as a guide to the public, and enable them to understand “the book of God,” meaning thereby a treatise on Grammar, the elements of which Abū Aswad was said to have learned from ʿAlī, the son-in-law of the Prophet himself. He at first asked to be excused, but when he heard a man, on reciting the passage ([Sūrah ix. 3]): Anna ʿllāha bariʾun mina ʾl-mushrikīna wa rasūluhu, pronounce the last word rasūlihi, which changes the meaning of the passage from “That God is clear of the idolaters, and His Apostle also,” into “That God is clear of the idolaters and of His Apostle,” he exclaimed, “I never thought that things would have come to such a pass.” He then went to Ziyād and said, “I shall do what you ordered; find me an intelligent scribe who will follow my directions.” On this a scribe belonging to the tribe of ʿAbdu ʾl-Qais was brought to him, but did not give him satisfaction: another then came, and ʿAbdu ʾl-Aswad said to him: “When you see me open (fataḥ) my mouth in pronouncing a letter, place a point over it; when I close (ẓamm) my mouth, place a point before the letter, and when I pucker up (kasar) my mouth, place a point under the letter.” Nöldeke, the learned author of Geschichte des Qorâns, rejects this part of the story as a fable, and it is certainly not to be taken in the literal sense, that each time a letter was pronounced, the scribe was supposed to watch the action of the dictater’s lips. But it seems reasonable enough to assume that in cases where much depended on the correct vocalisation of a word, and where the reciter would naturally put a particular emphasis on it, Abū Aswad should instruct his amanuensis not to rely upon his ears only in fixing upon the sound, but also call the testimony of his eyes to his aid. At any rate, the name of the vowel-points: Fatḥah, “opening,” for a, ẓammah, “contraction,” for u, and kasrah, “fracture” (as the puckering up of the mouth may fitly be called), is well explained, and the notation itself:
for fatḥah,
for ẓammah and
for kasrah, is that which we still find in some of the old Cufic manuscripts of the Qurʾān marked in red ink or pigment. We refer the reader to the first specimen of Cufic writing given below (p. 687), which he is requested to compare with the transcript in the modern Arabic character and with our Roman transliteration, when he will readily perceive that the points or dots in the Cufic fragment correspond to the short vowels of the transliteration, while, in the Arabic transcript, they serve to distinguish the consonants. Take, for instance, the point above the second letter of the third word, and it will at once be seen that in the Cufic form it expresses the a after the n of tanazzalat, for it recurs again after the l in the last syllable, and that in the Nask͟hī character it distinguishes the n (نـ) itself from the preceding double-pointed t (تـ), both which letters remain without a distinctive sign in the Cufic.
To return to Ibn K͟hallikān: he relates in another place, after Abū Aḥmad al-ʿAskarī, that in the days of ʿAbdu ʾl-Malik ibn Marwān, the fifth K͟halīfah of the Umaiyah dynasty, the erroneous readings of the Qurʾān had become numerous and spread through ʿIrāq. This obliged the governor, al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf, to have recourse to his kātibs, for the purpose of putting distinctive marks on the words of uncertain pronunciation; and it is said that Naṣr ibn ʿĀṣim undertook that duty and imagined single and double points (nuqat̤, pl. of nuqt̤ah, “drop,” “dot”), which he placed in different manners. The people then passed some time without making any copies of the Qurʾān but with points, the usage of which did not, however, prevent some false readings from taking place, and for this reason they invented the Iʿjām (signs serving to distinguish the letters of the same form from one another), and they thus placed the iʿjām posteriorly to the nuqat̤.
Primâ facie, this seems to contradict the passage quoted previously, according to which Abū Aswad would be the inventor of the nuqat̤ or vowel-points, and the same remark applies to another account of the same author, which we shall adduce presently. Pending our attempt to reconcile the different statements, we notice here two fresh particulars of some importance. For the first time mention is made of double points, and we shall scarcely be wrong if we refer this to the way in which the Nunnation or Tanwīn, that is the sounding of an n after the vowels, is expressed in the early writing. It is simply by doubling the vowel-signs in the same position in which the single points are placed:
