Mim م

Mim is the twenty-fourth letter of the modern Arabic order and the thirteenth of the older abjad order, from which it takes the numeral value forty. It is written as a small closed loop with a tail that falls below the line, and it joins on both sides, keeping the loop and dropping the tail when it does. In the middle of a word it is little more than a filled circle sitting on the line, which makes it one of the most recognisable letters in a dense hand.

Mim is a moon letter, so the lam of the definite article is pronounced before it. Its sound is the bilabial nasal, the m of English, and it is one of the few Arabic consonants that a speaker of a European language can produce without instruction.

Its name descends from the Northwest Semitic mem, the cognate of Hebrew mem and Syriac mim, whose sense was water, and it holds the numeral value forty that Hebrew mem holds. In the Hebrew tradition mem is one of the three mother letters of the Sefer Yetzirah and carries the element water in that system; Arabic has no corresponding classification of its own letters, and the atlas does not transfer one across.

Mim is among the most frequently occurring letters in the disjoined groups that open certain suras. It stands beside the pharyngeal ha in a large group of them and beside alif and lam in others, and it is one of the letters that has attracted most comment in the arguments about what those groups mean.

A Quranic manuscript is a designed object, and its design is made almost entirely out of writing. The earliest surviving codices are written in angular hands on parchment, many of them in a horizontal format wider than it is tall, with few lines to the page and letters spaced generously across them. Later paper codices are taller than they are wide and carry many more lines, in the rounded book hands that displaced the angular ones.

The apparatus around the text grew in stages and can be dated. The bare consonantal skeleton came first. Consonantal pointing was added, then vowel marking, often in a second colour so that the layers stay visually separate. Verse division marks, group markers at every fifth and tenth verse, sura headings giving a name and a count, and the marks that divide the text into portions for reading over a month were added as the manuscript tradition developed, and their presence, form and colour are among the things a cataloguer uses to place and date a copy.

Illumination in these manuscripts is geometric and vegetal rather than figural, and it frames the writing rather than illustrating it. Frontispieces, sura headings and marginal medallions are the places where gold and colour appear. The result is a book in which the only representational content is the letters themselves, which is the visual consequence of the place writing holds in the tradition.

The atlas records the physical and codicological facts, which are the historian's to establish, and describes the contents rather than reproducing them. What a manuscript looks like, when it was made and how its apparatus developed are matters of record; the text it carries belongs to the tradition that transmits it.