Broken cursive (New Style)

Scholars have given one distinctive Qur'an script many names: eastern kufic, eastern Persian kufic, broken kufic, kufic naskhi, Carmathian kufic; modern Arabic usage calls it kufi murabba' (square kufic) as against kufi mudawwar (round kufic). Eric Schroeder proposed badi' ("new, marvellous") and withdrew it when Mojtaba Minovi showed that al-khatt al-badi' was only a generic phrase; S. M. Stern called it rhomboid, and some Iranian scholars call it piramuz, linking it to a script Ibn al-Nadim says the Persians invented. ¹

Sheila Blair observes that almost all these names assume a linear development from angular kufic through this script to a fully round one. Estelle Whelan proposed "broken cursive" on a different assumption — that the script was an independent stylisation of basic round handwriting — choosing a strictly visual name free of the political connotations of "New Abbasid Style" and pointing to its origin in the chancery scribe's round hand. Blair follows this usage because she believes the reasoning is correct. ¹

In Blair's account, early copyists used a round "bookish" script (François Déroche's term) for non-Qur'anic texts, occasionally adopted it for the Qur'an, stylised it into this mannered variant, and secretaries then turned it into a flowing round style: Ibn Muqla is credited with regularising it into the well-proportioned script (al-khatt al-mansub), and Ibn al-Bawwab with giving it grace. An early dated example is a Qur'an endowed in the name of the nurse of the Zirid amir al-Mu'izz ibn Badis in 410/1020, which is why the script was also called western kufic. ^{1 2}