The 28 (or 29, if we include the lām ʾalif) letters of the Arabic alphabet, as we know them today, developed from a primitive set of 17 basic letter shapes (graphemes), which included a number of same-looking forms (homographs; Arabic alphabet: origin). These letter forms at the beginning of Islam had nothing in themselves that would indicate their future grand place in Islamic art. And yet, within perhaps several decades after the birth of Islam, the Arabic script began to take on qualities which later in the Abbasid period blossomed into beautiful handwriting used to adorn the pages of the Q…