Hijazi script

Maryam Ekhtiar writes that the earliest Qur'an folios are vertical in format and written in hijazi, an unofficial script named after the province of northwest Arabia that holds Mecca and Medina, although she thinks it unlikely that these copies were made there. ¹

Hijazi is marked by the rightward slant of the letter shafts and by the final ya, which turns backward to underline the letter before it. These Qur'ans were largely without the consonant points that distinguish letters of the same shape and without vowel marks: the Qur'an was memorised rather than read word by word, so the copies served as an aid to recitation. Another feature is a single column of text, unlike the multi-column codices of other cultures of the region. ¹

Kufic replaced hijazi for copying the Qur'an from the late seventh century. ² An example is a folio in the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham (Mingana 1572a), which the author places in the Hijaz, probably mid-seventh century ³; see the Birmingham Qur'an. Some early fragments are palimpsests whose first text was scraped away, and ultraviolet light has helped scholars read their layers. ^{1 4} From the eighth century hijazi Qur'ans already carried decorated sura headings. ⁵