In the year 1000, a copyist who ranks among the great masters of Arabic calligraphy, 'Alī b. Hilāl, better known as Ibn al-Bawwāb, completed the transcription of a copy of the Qur'an that is now preserved in Dublin's Chester Beatty Library. The manuscript itself is of little interest to us, except for one point: its handwriting. In the final analysis, it is relatively close to that found on contemporary printed copies. In other words, a reader today would have little difficulty reading this millennium-old copy. By way of comparison, a Latin manuscript from the same period would undoubtedly give more trouble to anyone attempting to decipher it without training in Latin paleography.
If time seems to have stopped at a very early date for Arabic writing, the first centuries of Islam witnessed a graphic development that attracts attention because, in the field of manuscripts, it concerns almost exclusively copies of the Koran, which were produced in considerable quantities. Researchers are fortunate to have at their disposal an abundance of documentation, the importance of which has long been overlooked, both for the history of the Koranic text and for our understanding of Islamic civilization in the first four centuries. Manuscripts from this period often appear as isolated leaves and, consequently, as testimonies that are difficult to exploit. However, this dispersal is often recent and mainly concerns copies of the Koran, which were in fact stored without particular care in a single location, safe from any soiling that might have affected the divine name. We know of four important repositories that have played a central role in our understanding of this history, and which have been "discovered" successively since the end of the 18th century.