Inconsistencies in the Uthmanic Rasm: When One Word Is Written Two Ways

When One Word Is Written Two Ways

Open a printed Qur'an and look at the bare outline of the words — the letters stripped of dots and vowel marks. This underlying skeleton is called the rasm (رسم), the "drawing" of the text. It is the layer that was fixed when the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, standardized the written copies — the masahif — around 650 CE and sent them to the great cities of the young empire.

Now notice something documented for over a thousand years: the same word is not always spelled the same way. In one verse a word carries an alif; in another the identical word drops it. The word for "prayer" is written with the letter waw where the sound is a long a. The feminine ending appears sometimes as an "open" ta and sometimes as a "closed" one — in the very same word, in different places.