Kufic

Kufic is a convenience rather than a category. The term was applied by later scholarship to the whole family of angular scripts found in early Quran manuscripts, and those manuscripts turn out on close examination to be written in a number of distinct hands with different letter forms, proportions and conventions, produced in different places and periods. Palaeographers have therefore developed classification systems that divide the material into groups by their actual features, and the older single label survives mainly as a general term.

The early codices themselves are distinctive objects. Many are broad rather than tall, written on parchment in few lines to the page with very large letters, which makes for a book that is impressive, expensive and slow to consult. Reading such a copy is not the same activity as reading a pocket book, and the format implies a setting: a mosque, a recitation, a patron. The marking of the text developed alongside the script. Systems of coloured dots and then of strokes were introduced to record vowels and to distinguish consonants written with the same skeleton, so an early copy can be seen accumulating the apparatus that later copies take for granted.

The angular style became the standard hand for inscribing buildings, and Islamic monumental epigraphy begins with it. A late seventh century inscription band inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, running for many metres in gold on a dark ground, is among the earliest substantial religious texts of Islam to survive in any form, and it is a building rather than a book. The same development turned coinage into a text bearing object, replacing rulers' portraits with words. The style was then elaborated for exactly this purpose. Letters grew leaf and flower terminals, their vertical strokes were plaited or knotted, and backgrounds filled with vegetal ornament, so that the inscription functions as decoration while remaining legible to a reader who knows what to expect.

A later development squared the letters entirely into a grid, which suited brickwork and tilework and produced inscriptions that can be read as pattern from a distance and as text up close. For copying scripture the style was superseded by rounder cursive hands that were faster to write and easier to read. It survived as the script of surfaces, and that is where most people meet it: on walls, domes, mihrabs, coins and tiles rather than on a page.