Orthography · a Light

Printed Qur'ans keep a spelling a thousand years old

The consonantal skeleton of the Uthmanic copies is preserved on purpose, even where it no longer matches how Arabic is written. The word salah carries a waw where modern spelling uses an alif. Some words carry a letter nobody pronounces, others drop one that is pronounced. Copyists were instructed not to modernise, and printed editions follow the same rule, adding vowel signs and dots on top of an unchanged skeleton rather than tidying it up. The result is that a page printed in Cairo last year and a seventh century parchment agree letter for letter in their consonants, which is what makes comparing them possible at all.

Rasm Uthmani, the consonantal skeleton