History
According to tradition, the first to commission a system of harakat was Muawiyah I of the Umayyad dynasty, when he ordered Ziad Ibn Abih, his wāli in Basra (governed 664–673), to find someone who would devise a method to transcribe correct reading. Ziad Ibn Abih, in turn, appointed Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali for the task. Abu al-Aswad devised a system of dots to signal the three short vowels (along with their respective allophones) of Arabic. This system of dots predates the ʾiʿǧām, dots used to distinguish between different consonants.
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Early Basmala Kufic
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Middle Kufic
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Modern Kufic in Qur'an
Read more about this topic: Arabic Diacritics
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“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
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