Rasm
Rasm is an Arabic writing script often used in the early centuries of Classical Arabic literature. Essentially it is the same as today's Arabic script except for the big difference that dots and dashes are omitted. In rasm, the five distinct letters ـبـ ـتـ ـثـ ـنـ ـيـ are indistinguishable because all the dots are omitted. It is also known as Arabic skeleton script.
History
In the early Arabic manuscripts that survive today, one finds dots but "putting dots was in no case compulsory". Some manuscripts have no dots at all, while others add dots only sparingly and only in phrase contexts where the scribe thinks the omission of dotting on a word would leave the meaning ambiguous.Rasm means 'drawing', 'outline', or 'pattern' in Arabic. When speaking of the Qur'an, it stands for the basic text made of the 18 letters without the Arabic diacritics which mark vowels and disambiguate consonants.
Letters
The Rasm is the oldest part of the Arabic script; it has 18 elements, excluding the ligature of lām and alif. When isolated and in the final position, the 18 letters are visually distinct. However, in the initial and medial positions, certain letters that are distinct otherwise are not differentiated visually. This results in only 15 visually distinct glyphs each in the initial and medial positions.- This character may not display correctly in some fonts. The dot should not appear in all four positional forms and the initial and medial forms should join with following character. In other words the initial and medial forms should look exactly like those of a dotless bāʾ while the isolated and final forms should look like those of a dotless nūn.
- There is no hamzah in rasm writing, including hamzah-on-the-line.
Historical example
Among which Kufic Blue Qur'an and Samarkand Qurʾan. The latter is written almost entirely in Kufic rasm: Surah Al-Aʿaraf, Ayahs 86 & 87, of the Samarkand Qur'an:Digital examples
| Description | Example | Image |
| Translation | The Arabic Alphabet | |
| Rasm | الاٮحدىه العرٮىه | |
| Short vowel diacritics omitted. This is the style used for most modern secular documents. | الابجدية العربية | |
| All diacritics. This style is used to show pronunciation unambiguously in dictionaries and modern Qurans. | أَلْأَبْجَدِيَّة ٱلْعَرَبِيَّة | |
| Romanisation | al-ʾabjadīyaḧ l-ʿarabīyah |
Compare the Basmala, the beginning verse of the Qurʾān with all diacritics and with the rasm only. Note that when rasm is written with spaces, spaces do not only occur between words. Within a word, spaces also appear between adjacent letters that are not connected, and this type of rasm is old and not used lately.
The sentence may not display correctly in some fonts. It appears as it should if the full Arabic character set from the Arial font is installed; or one of the SIL International fonts Scheherazade or Lateef; or Katibeh.