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272
THE ALPHABET
Early Development of Arabic Alphabet
The early history of the Arabic character is also obscure. According to the Arabic writer Nadim, or Abulfaraj Mohammed ibn Ishag ibn abi Ya'qub un-Nadim, of Baghdad, who lived in the latter half of the tenth century A.D., the early branches of the Arabic script developed in the following cities and in the following order: (1) Mecca, (2) Medina, (3) Basra, and (4) Kufa. There is, however, no doubt that while in these important cities, as in some others, such as Damascus, there existed famous schools in which local scripts developed, the order given by Nadim was prejudiced by Islamic orthodoxy.
From early times, the varieties of the script were not only geographical; there were also some variants according to the style of writing. Indeed, according to Nadim, the early Mecca-Medina branch had three vari and the Kufa-Basra branch had six. Nadim distinguishes also three varieties of the somewhat later Isfahani branch, one of which, the qairamus, became the prototype of the Persian. Of these various early styles mentioned by Nadim, only two have been identified, the ma'il, a sloping delicate hand, and the mashg, an elongated or "spread-out writing with undue spacing between the letters, which was common in early Cufic Codices" (Jeffery).
Development of Arabic Script: Kufic and Naskhi (Fig. 132, col. 5, 6 and 9.)
On the whole, it may be said that in the early Mohammedan period there were two main types of Arabic writing, the Kufic or Cufic30 termed from the town Kufa, in Mesopotamia, the seat of a famous Moslem school and the Naskhi. Kufic, which developed towards the end of the seventh century A.D. in the two old centres of Kufa and Basra, was a beautiful, monumental script. It was employed mainly for writing on stone and on metal, and especially in painted or carved inscriptions on the walls of the mosques, and on coins (Fig. 134).
There are, however, many beautiful Qur'an manuscripts extant which were executed on broad parchment rolls, and written in the heavy lapidary Kufic style. It was a large, bold, but stylized hand; its letters are generally thick, squat and upright, and rather angular. With the high development of Arabic calligraphy, Kufic became more and more consistent in the height and thickness and form of the letters, and became an exceptionally ästhetic script. Kufic gave rise to a number of varieties, mostly mediæval, in northern (known as Maghribi, or "western," Fig. 132, col. 7) and central Africa, Spain, and northern Arabia (Fig. 132, col. 8: 134, 2); the last is known as Qarmathian, and is considered by some scholars as "a particular kind of Naskhi." Kufic has been discontinued except for formal purposes, where cursive writing cannot be employed.
