Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali and the First Points

An Empire Changing Its Tongue

In the previous article we followed the five Mus’hafs that Uthman ﵁ sent out from Medina to Mecca, Damascus, Kufa, Basra and the mother-city itself, each accompanied by a reciter, and the story closed on an unanswered question. The rasm that was spread across five cities on that journey, the skeleton that the scribes of Uthman ﵁ had set down, was a masterpiece of austerity. No points, no vowel marks, no verse divisions, no surah headings. A frame of consonants, carried by a living oral tradition passed from teacher to pupil. For Quraish, for the first Companions ﵃, for anyone who had drunk Arabic with their mother’s milk, that austerity was no lack. It was elegance. The voice supplied what the ink left unspoken.

But the world around the Mus’haf had not stood still.

By the year 40 AH the empire of Islam stretched from Sind to North Africa. The armies of the Companions ﵃ and their sons had broken Persia, taken Byzantine Egypt, crossed the deserts of Khorasan and reached the mountain passes of the Atlas range. Behind the armies came the administrators, behind the administrators came the teachers, and behind the teachers came something that no one in Medina had foreseen on the scale at which it was now unfolding. Peoples who did not speak Arabic became Muslims. Persians who had learned their mother tongue in Pahlavi, Aramaic speakers in Iraq and Syria, Copts in Egypt, Berbers in the Maghreb, all opened their mouths for the Shahada and then for the Quran.

They learned to recite. Many learned well. But the Arabic they met was not the language of their mother; it was a learned language, a studied language, and the Quran was their first and highest textbook. What was self-evident to the son of Quraish was a riddle to the son of Fars. How were you to know where to open the mouth, where to round the lips, where to let the voice fall. The rasm gave no answer. The rasm relied on the teacher.

And teachers were not present in sufficient number everywhere.

Al-Azami ﵀ describes the background of this tension in his chapter on the palaeography of early Arabic. The expansion of the Muslim lands brought the Arabic script into contact with speakers whose tongues had been trained in other sounds, and the differences were not trivial. Tribes pronounced the same word in different ways. Some said hatta where others heard atta. Some said siraat where others pronounced siraat with a different timbre. To the practised Arabic listener these were dialectal ornaments. To the non-Arabic reader they were traps. He read what he saw, and what he saw was a chain of letters without the cues that an Arab’s ear filled in of its own accord.

The rasm that had served Quraish well became, in the mouth of the newcomer, a stumbling block. Not because the rasm failed; the rasm was still inviolable. But because the times called for a support, an aid, an addition that the ear of the Arab himself had never needed.

Within that tension a man was called awake.

The Famous Incident

His name was Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀. A poet, a grammarian in so far as that word already existed then, a loyal follower of Ali ibn Abi Talib ﵁. He had not seen the world of the Prophet ﷺ with his own eyes, but he stood close enough to that world that its scent still clung to his clothes. He lived in Basra, a city not yet forty years old that in that short time had grown into a melting pot of Arab tribes, Persian converts and Aramaic officials. Whoever wished to learn the Quran in Basra learned it in the midst of languages that crossed one another daily.

The tradition knows several versions of the moment when Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ decided that something had to be done. Some reports place the incident in his own home. His daughter, so it is told, uttered a sentence in which a change of sound reversed the meaning. She meant to say “how beautiful the sky is” and she said something that sounded like “what is there in the sky that is beautiful”, a question where she had intended an exclamation. He corrected her, and the thought settled itself in him. If his own daughter, raised under his own roof, could make these errors, what then of the tens of thousands of newcomers who had never known the language as a mother tongue.

Another tradition is graver. Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ is said to have heard, in a market in Basra, a non-Arabic reader reciting from Surah at-Tawba. The verse in question speaks of the relation of Allah ﷻ and His Messenger ﷺ to the polytheists, and the outcome of the verse hangs on a single timbre at the end of a word. Rasuluhu with a damma means that the Messenger ﷺ is free of the polytheists. Rasulihi with a kasra would, if so read, suggest a wholly different syntactic relation, a reading that is theologically unthinkable. The reader did not know the difference. He read what he saw, and the rasm gave him no warning.

Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ walked on, but he no longer walked at ease. Something in him had heard the necessity of the hour. The Mus’haf of Uthman ﵁ was inviolable in its skeleton. But the ear of the non-Arabic reader was not inviolable, and when the ear failed, the tongue failed, and when the tongue failed in a verse, the meaning could tip over. It was not a matter of correcting the Quran. It was a matter of protecting the Quran against the human tendency to see wrongly what is written rightly.

He now had a task. But not yet a system.

The Question to Ali ﵁

The older traditions place at the beginning of Abu al-Aswad’s ﵀ work an encounter that would shape the whole of later Arabic grammar. He went, so it is told, to Ali ibn Abi Talib ﵁ in Kufa. The Caliph, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet ﷺ, was known for his eloquence; it was said that he spoke as no one spoke, with an authority that came both from the heart and from the mind. Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ laid the concern before him. The Quran is read wrongly by those who do not have the language as a mother tongue. The errors are spreading. Something must be done.

Ali ﵁ listened. Then, so the tradition goes, he wrote something on a sheet and gave it to Abu al-Aswad. On the sheet stood three words that would order the world of Arabic grammar for the centuries that would follow.

Whether this encounter took place word for word in this way is a question the scholars have discussed. What is not in dispute is the legacy. The threefold division that is established in this encounter, ism and fi’l and harf, forms to this day the foundation of every Arabic grammar. Whoever has ever read a chapter of the Ajurrumiyya or opened a commentary of Ibn Aqil is in fact reading an elaboration of those three words. And the man who wrote them down at the command of Ali ﵁ was the same man who some years later would return to Basra with a question that was no longer only about words, but about ink.

For to describe grammar was one thing. To make grammar visible on the parchment of the Mus’haf was another.

The Commission of Ziyad

Between the moment in Kufa and the moment of the red ink lie years of which the sources tell us little. What we know is that Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ returned to Basra and worked on there. Ali ﵁ was killed one morning in Ramadan 40 AH in Kufa by the blow of a Khariji. The khilafa passed to Mu’awiyah ﵁ in Damascus. The geography of power shifted. Damascus became the heart, and the provinces were governed by men whom the Caliph trusted.

For Iraq that meant the appointment of Ziyad ibn Abihi. Ziyad was a stern administrator, a man with a talent for order and a short tolerance for disorder. He ruled over Basra and later over Kufa as well, and under his rule Iraq changed from a collection of restless garrison towns into a functioning province. He is known in history above all for his iron hand. What is less well known is that the same hand gave a commission whose consequences are still visible daily in every Mus’haf on earth.

Thus the tradition relates that Ziyad sent a messenger to Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀. Al-Azami places the actual application of the dotting system to a Mus’haf in the reign of Mu’awiyah ﵁ and dates the work cautiously to around the year 50 AH; the tradition that names the governor of Iraq as its instigator belongs within that time window. Ziyad had heard of the knowledge of Abu al-Aswad ﵀, and he had also heard of the errors that were being made in Basra in reciting. A governor is not always a scholar, but a good governor knows when he must listen to the scholar. Ziyad wanted a system. He wanted the Quran, in his province, to be read as it had to be read. He asked Abu al-Aswad ﵀ to develop a sign, an aid, a support in the ink itself, so that the non-Arabic reader could find the right sounds without needing a teacher for every verse.

Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ hesitated. He was aware of what was at stake. The rasm of the Mus’haf was the text of Uthman ﵁, the text that the Companions ﵃ had approved and sent out. To add to it was no small matter. Whoever touched the Mus’haf touched the community. The scholars had a caution centuries deep on this point; even generations later Imam Malik ﵀, when he was asked whether the Mus’haf might be copied out with the newest spelling conventions, would reject the idea for the official codex and permit it only for the textbooks of schoolchildren.

But Ziyad insisted. And Abu al-Aswad saw what Ziyad saw, namely that the errors did not cease of their own accord. The silence of the rasm was no solution when people did not know how to fill that silence. He consented. But he set a condition. The addition would not touch the text itself. It would be a second layer, in another colour, in a form that no one could mistake for a letter. It would be serving, not pretentious. It would be help, not authority.

The Mus’haf remained the Mus’haf. What was added to it would be red.

A Scribe, Red Ink, No Confusion

He chose his scribe with care. The tradition does not always give the name, but it describes the man as a writer with a steady hand and a calm head, someone who would not improvise and would not hesitate. Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ had him sit before him with a new Mus’haf open on the reading stand, with the black ink of the rasm sharp and clear in the morning light. Beside him stood a second inkpot. That pot held no black. It held red.

He gave him the instruction. Do not read to me, he said. Do not write what I say. Look only at my mouth. When I open my mouth, place a red dot above the letter I have reached. When I round my lips, place a red dot before the letter. When I let my mouth drop, place a red dot below the letter. When I close my mouth, place a small mark indicating that no sound follows.

The scribe nodded. Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ began to recite.

He read slowly. He did not read for the rhythm of the tilawa, he read to show the mouth. Verse after verse slid past, and at every letter on which a vowel fell, the scribe saw the gesture and set the dot. A dot above for fatha, the opening sound. A dot before for damma, the round sound. A dot below for kasra, the downward sound. A small mark for sukun, the silence of a closed consonant. Four kinds of gesture, three kinds of dot and one mark. No letters. No words. Only points in another colour, silent as a teacher is silent who directs the pupil with a nod alone.

Thus in Basra, somewhere in the years between the end of the reign of Mu’awiyah ﵁ and the beginning of that of Yazid, a craft was born. It was no addition to the revelation. It was no change to the rasm. It was a second layer, in another colour, which bowed humbly over the first layer and served it. Black remained sacred. Red was help.

Al-Azami stresses in his description of this moment a detail that is easily overlooked. The dots that Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ had placed were not the same as what we see today in the Mus’haf. What we see are the small shapes of fatha, damma and kasra as they were later designed by al-Khalil ibn Ahmad ﵀. What Abu al-Aswad introduced were round points, simple red dots that distinguished themselves by their position relative to the black letter. The position was the system. Above, before, below, and over it the small sukun mark. The place of the point was the sound.

It was simple enough that a pupil could remember it. It was clear enough that an error in the pronunciation would henceforth be contradicted by an error in the ink. It was discreet enough that the black rasm remained untouched. No letter was moved, no word was altered, no shape was added to the skeleton of the revelation. The dots lived in the margin between the letters, in the white space that the rasm had deliberately left open.

What He Did and What He Did Not Do

The joy of an invention is often tempered by what it cannot yet do. The system of Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ was a breakthrough for the vowels. But the Arabic script had a second problem that was much older and much more stubborn.

Different letters share the same skeleton. Ba and ta and tha look, without distinguishing marks, exactly alike. The same loop at the start, the same tail at the end. Ya and nun too, under certain conditions, share their form with other letters. Ha and kha and jeem share their curve. Dal and dhal share their hook. Sien and shien share their teeth. Sad and dad share their loop. Without distinguishing points one frame could represent five or six different sounds, and which sound was meant the reader had to infer from the context.

For the practised Arab this was no problem. He did not read letter by letter; he read word by word, sentence by sentence, in a memory that had already sorted the possible sounds before the eye reached them. But for the non-Arabic reader this was a second trap, alongside the trap of the missing vowel. He not only did not know which timbre fell between two letters; he sometimes did not know which letter he had before him.

Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ left this problem for what it was. Not for lack of insight, but out of a sense for what he could and could not carry. He had added one layer in red. A second layer, this time to distinguish consonants, would bring still more ink onto the page, and he suspected that the system could not bear his work. It would require another generation, another mind, and another governor who would again have the courage to give the command.

That generation would come. The names that history has preserved are Nasr ibn Asim al-Laythi ﵀ and Yahya ibn Ya’mar al-Adwani ﵀, both pupils or pupils-of-pupils of Abu al-Aswad; they were the same scholars through whose hands his system was passed to the following generations. Under the governor al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, a man who ruled with the same sternness as Ziyad but with still greater ambition, they are connected in the tradition with the work on a system to distinguish the consonants themselves. Their solution would be the black points, placed above or below the letter, in a different position from the red vowel points and in a different colour scheme, so that the two systems would not cross one another.

Only a century later would al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi ﵀ bring everything together in one elegant system, in which the red dots disappeared and the vowels were rendered by small shapes that we still know today as fatha, damma, kasra and sukun. But that is the story of the next article.

What Abu al-Aswad did was the first step. And the first step is, as every teacher knows, often the hardest.

The Work Spreads

An invention lives or dies by what happens after it. A solitary scholar can devise a brilliant system and it can vanish with him into his grave. What Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ devised spread precisely not only because it was brilliant, but because it arose at the right moment in the right city. Basra in these years was not just any provincial town. It was, together with Kufa, the heart of a new Arabic intellectual culture that was taking shape. In its markets the tribes of the desert met one another; in its mosques the scholars of the Quran and the hadith met one another; in its outskirts Persian converts built their houses beside Arab soldiers of Tamim and Bakr and Azd.

Whoever spoke a new idea in Basra saw it travel within a season to Kufa, within a year to Damascus, within a few years to Egypt and Khorasan. The trade routes carried not only goods, they carried also books, manuscripts, pupils and memories. The red dots of Abu al-Aswad travelled along.

In Kufa, where the school of the Quran-readers had had an authority of its own ever since Ibn Mas’ud ﵁, the system was taken over with some adaptation. In Egypt, where the Mus’haf of Uthman ﵁ was kept in Fustat, scribes adopted it for local copies. In Medina, where the austerity of the Prophet’s city still nursed a reverent mistrust of every innovation, it went more slowly; there the scribes preferred to wait until the community had decided that the addition was safe. But within two generations there was scarcely a centre left where the red dots were not used for teaching-Mus’hafs.

The Mus’haf of Uthman ﵁ itself, kept in its original form in the mosque of Medina, received none of these additions. There the rasm remained naked, as the Caliph had had it calligraphed. That was no coincidence; it was deliberate reverence. The official codex had to keep its original shape, so that every dispute over a reading could always be traced back to the original. The copies that were used for teaching, on the other hand, might be furnished with the dots, for they served the pupil and not the archive.

This distinction between the archive codex and the teaching codex would endure through the centuries. To this day the old Mus’hafs are kept in the libraries of Istanbul, Tashkent, Cairo and Topkapi with their naked rasm, while the Mus’hafs that are used in the mosques and homes are full of vowel marks, verse divisions, juz’ markings and sajda indications. It is the same text. But the one carries its history, and the other carries its service.

Evidence from Archaeology

The story above is not only tradition. Al-Azami gives attention in his chapter on the dotting system to the material evidence that supports this story. Early Mus’hafs from the first century AH have been preserved, and in a number of them the red vowel points are visible, precisely in the manner that the sources describe. A dot above the letter for fatha, a dot before or after it for damma, a dot below it for kasra. The dots are red. The rasm beneath is black. The two layers live side by side, recognisable to whoever knows what he is seeing.

The famous fragments of San’aa, which according to the well-known account came to light in 1972 during restoration work on the Great Mosque, are among the earliest witnesses to this technique. Al-Azami shows in his description a number of these codices, kept in the National Archive Museum of Yemen, on which the second layer is unmistakably present. The ink is faded, the parchment has turned brown, but under a good light the red dots are still recognisable as dots other than the black around them.

When archaeology and tradition meet one another, history gains a second anchor point. Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ died, by most accounts, in 69 AH. Mus’hafs from his own lifetime and from the generations directly after bear the traces of his instruction. The system spread quickly, not because a Caliph imposed it, but because the need was real. Every non-Arabic reader who saw the red dots for the first time saw his own problem solved. Every teacher who instructed a pupil received an instrument in hand that quickened the learning process. The ink spread as good news spreads: not by force, but by gratitude.

Al-Azami notes that the early scribes each developed a taste of their own in the execution. Some used round dots, others small strokes, and in later developments green, yellow and pale-blue dots came into use alongside the red to indicate certain nuances. No fixed style, no central authority that imposed the system. It was a craft, and like every craft it developed in the hands of its practitioners. What all the early Mus’hafs had in common was the reverence for the black rasm and the willingness to place, in another colour above or below it, a serving layer.

That reverence is no detail. It is the key to the whole story.

The Man Behind the Points

We have so far said little about Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ himself, as though his invention were more important than the man. That is in a sense true, for great works outlive their makers. But the man deserves his own attention as well, because in the course of his life it becomes visible why he and not another could do this work.

He was born in the years before the Hijra, in a tribe called Du’al, belonging to Kinana. He grew up in the Arabian desert with the language of his mother as a matter of course. He met Islam as a young man; some sources place him among those who still saw the Prophet ﷺ, others say that he became a Muslim only under Abu Bakr ﵁ or Umar ﵁. He settled in Basra when that city was founded in 14 AH, and he belonged to the first generation to build a house there.

He was a poet, and in Arabic culture to be a poet was no small matter. A good poet knew the fine mechanics of the language from within; he knew how a vowel could save or break a metre, how a pronunciation could carry a rhyme or let it drop, how a wrongly placed stress could ruin a whole line. Whoever wrote poetry in Arabic thought in vowels and consonants in a way that the ordinary speaker never had to. Abu al-Aswad ﵀ brought this habit of thought with him to his work on the Mus’haf. He was no official carrying out a commission; he was a man whose whole life had prepared him for the question that Ziyad put to him.

He was moreover a follower of Ali ﵁, and that loyalty cost him trouble in a time when Mu’awiyah ﵁ ruled in Damascus and his administrators were not always kind to those who had belonged to the camp of the previous Caliph. But Ziyad recognised worth where he saw it, and the old political fault lines were set aside when a work had to be done that was greater than a political preference. Whoever wished to have the Quran read better could afford no factional feuds. Ziyad gave the commission, Abu al-Aswad carried it out, and the two men, for the rest not exactly kindred spirits, found each other in this one matter.

He stood, so the later scholars wrote, at the beginning of what the Arabs would call al-nahw, the science of grammar. Whether he founded that science himself or only helped it to be born is a question for specialists. What is certain is that his name is mentioned in every biographical source of Arabic grammar, and that his work on the points cannot be seen apart from his work on the structure of the language. Whoever knows which vowel falls at the end of a word also knows which grammatical function that word fulfils. Vowel points and grammatical analysis are two sides of the same coin.

He died in 69 AH, old enough to survive the plague of Basra that passed over the city in that year and carried off many. His grave is no longer known; the centuries have effaced the place. What they have not effaced are the red dots. Everyone who ever opens an early Mus’haf and sees there the second layer sees the hand of a poet from Basra who somewhere between 40 and 69 AH, at the command of a governor, placed the first vowel points of Islam.

The Deeper Lesson

In this article we stand on a threshold that recurs in Islamic civilisation. On the one side stands the revelation itself, set down by the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions ﵃, and pinned down forever in the rasm of Uthman ﵁. On the other side stands the human community that must receive this revelation, and that in its diversity always seeks new supports to pass the message on purely. The question of Islamic scholarship has always been: how do we serve the text without changing the text.

The answer of Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ was elegant in its humility. He did not touch the black. He added no letters, he altered no shapes, he adjusted no spelling rules. What he did was to create a second layer, in another colour, with another purpose. The red points were no addition to the Quran. They were a support of the oral tradition that had always carried the Quran. What the teacher did with his voice, the dots did with the ink. Nothing more, nothing less.

With that Abu al-Aswad ﵀ passed a principle on to the generations after him. The Quran itself is inviolable. But the aids for reading, understanding, memorising, teaching the Quran may evolve with the needs of the community. Verse divisions, surah headings, juz’ markings, ruku’ markings, ornaments in gold ink for every fifth or tenth aya, all of this was added to the Mus’haf in the centuries after Abu al-Aswad ﵀ without touching the text itself. The manner has always been the same: another colour, another form, an unmistakable distinction between the sacred black and the serving addition.

Imam Malik ﵀ would later, when asked whether the spelling of the Mus’haf might be modernised, reject the innovation for the official codex and permit it only for the schoolchildren. He did not thereby reject the aids, he rejected the adjustment of the authoritative text itself. The red dots were no adjustment. The gold circles around the verse numbers were no adjustment. The fatha and damma and kasra in their later forms were no adjustment. They were all layers on top, and they acknowledged by their other colour or their other position that they were not the text, but the servants of the text.

In that sense the work of Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ is not only a technical invention, it is a theological act, for by one simple choice for red ink he set down the principle by which the Mus’haf could be served for fourteen centuries without ever being touched. Here lies the core of the whole story. The skeleton of consonants that Uthman ﵁ had sent out already stood fixed before the first red dot was placed; the dots added nothing to that skeleton and took nothing from it, they only made visible what the Arabic tongue had always read in it. The vocalisation did not change the text, it refined the reading. What was self-evident to the son of Quraish was made visible in the ink for the son of Fars, and the meaning that had stood in danger of tipping over stood henceforth fixed. The blackness of the letters of Uthman ﵁ has been changed by no later generation. All the aids that we see today when we open a Mus’haf live in the second layer, in the colour or form that says: I am here to help you read, not to be the text.

Whoever lets this thought sink in well understands why the Muslim community has been able to transmit the Quran through thirteen centuries of political upheavals, schisms, translations, printing press and digitisation, without ever seeing a rival canon arise. The rasm has never been touched. What has been added to it has always been visible as an addition. The boundaries have never blurred.

Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali ﵀ died in 69 AH in Basra, the same city where he had had his red points placed. He left behind no academy, no school community, no written treatise that explained his method in detail. What he left behind was a habit, a form, a craft in the hands of scribes who in their turn trained pupils. And while that habit spread, in the East of the Caliphate an administrator came to power who would touch the written Mushaf in a wholly different way, not with a pen in the margin but with the administrative arm of the state.

For the red dots lay on the parchment, the vowels had been made visible, and the consonants still awaited their turn. In the workshops of Basra, under the oil lamps of the scribes, the first ink of a tradition dried that still had fourteen centuries before it. But before that tradition would make its next technical leap, a governor stepped forward whose name would remain bound through the centuries to an accusation.

In the next article we meet Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ath-Thaqafi, the governor of Iraq who had copies of the Uthmanic text spread across the great and the lesser cities. Onto that sober logistical deed was later grafted the charge that in those copies he had altered eleven words of the revelation, an accusation that, had it been true, would have overthrown an entire textual history. We shall see why it was false, and why it was precisely the pointless skeleton that Abu al-Aswad ﵀ had left untouched that made that charge impossible at a stroke.