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Question
To
begin with may Allah reward you for your answers to our questions. I
have read about the different ways of reading in your Q&As; is the Qur'an
written in different ways also? Or are the different readings only in
the way it is read and in the written form it is always the same? Answer And
May Allah reward you for your questions that benefit many. At
the advent of Islam, the Arabic writing did not have the dots and vowelization
it now has. This is because there
was no need for it. Those who
could read were able to look at the little “teeth” and know immediately
which letter it was, and know what vowels were to be used. The scribes wrote
down the revelation using this way of writing. An
example of a copy of part of surah An-Naas between the 2nd and 3rd
century is:
You
may notice there are no “dots” over the letters, so the
and
look
the same. Khalifah ‘Uthman, may Allah be pleased with him, found the
need to collect all copies of the Qur’an when Islam spread to other lands,
and confusion occurred as to what was the word of Allah, and what was
explanation of the meaning. The
companions and those that followed them in the early days of Islam would write
explanations of the meaning next to the aayaat for their own benefit, and some
Muslims copied these copies of the Qur’an with these comments, and recited
with the tafseer instead of the words of Allah.
Caliph ‘Uthman ordered all copied of the Qur’an be sent to him, and
he made a new mus-haf that included all the different ways of recitation in
one writing. Remember, the advent
of dots and vowels on the little “teeth” of letters was not yet a reality,
so there was no need for different copies, when it came to that factor. There
is no way of recitation that violates the writing in the ‘Uthmani copy of
the Qur’an. All authentic ways
of recitation with different recitation of the same word have the same number
of “teeth” or shape of the letter.
All copies of the Qur’an that were in difference with the ‘Uthmani
copy of the Qur’an were burned. In
later years, the need for vowelization and diacritics (dot system) became
evident. The diacritics were
different from place to place, but all could read the copy of the Qur’an
once they understood the particular diatric and vowelization system.
This present day, there are two different diacritic systems for two different ways of recitation. The Warsh ‘an Naafi' copy of the Qur’an uses a slightly different system than the copies of the Qur’an used for the way of Hafs ‘an ‘Aasim. For example in the copy of the Qur’an used for the way of Warsh, the and the are written with the circle, of course, since this is how it was written at the time of the Prophet, , but the dots are different. The dot for the is underneath the circle, and there is only one dot for the , placed above the circle. The following is the Warsh copy of the Qur'an for Surah Al-Falaq.
Of course the voweling and diacritics for each way of reading,
corresponds to the recitation of that particular way.
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