Qur’anic Diacritical Marks and Dot-System and the Orientalists: A Critical Study

Abstract

An important entryway of Orientalists for their criticism on Qur'anic textual corpus is its diacritical indications and dot system. The major theme of Orientalists debate leads towards the myth that variant readings of the Qut an have been emerged due to lack of vowels and dots in Qur'anic script In fact,Orientalists assumption of the Qur script being written out Vowels and diacritical marks before and during the reign of the caliph Uthman actually demonstrates the unawareness about the development of Arabic script. According to Orientalists, the Muslims conceived the variant readings just because the earliest manuscripts were empty of diacritical marks and free from dot system. However, the considerable point is that why we observe that these variants had converged to one single Qira'ah most of the times? The Orientalists' utmost desire is to invoke divergences in Quranic Text through its established readings. The paper discards the assumptions of Orientalists like Noldeke, Karl Vollers, Paul E Khale, Goldziher and Arthur Jeffery etc. and establishes the authenticity of variant readings of the Qur’an.

Keywords

• Variant Readings
• Qur’anic Text
• Diacritical System of the Qur’an
• Orientalism