Qaf ق

Qaf is the twenty-first letter of the modern Arabic order and the nineteenth of the older abjad order, from which it takes the numeral value one hundred. It is written as a loop resembling that of fa but deeper, dropping below the line, and marked with two dots above. It joins on both sides.

Qaf is a moon letter, and it is the letter the whole category is named after. The Arabic word for moon begins with qaf, the definite article before it is both written and pronounced al-, and the fourteen letters that behave this way have been called the moon letters ever since, against the fourteen sun letters that assimilate the lam.

Its sound is a voiceless uvular stop, made with the back of the tongue against the very back of the roof of the mouth, further back than the k of English and distinct from the Arabic kaf. It is one of the most variable letters in spoken Arabic: a glottal stop in the cities of Egypt and the Levant, a hard g across much of the Gulf, Upper Egypt and among bedouin speakers, and a uvular stop in formal reading and recitation everywhere. Which value a speaker uses is one of the strongest markers of region and register in the language.

Its name descends from the Northwest Semitic qoph, the cognate of Hebrew qof and Syriac qoph, whose sense has been reconstructed as the back of the head. It is one of the fourteen letters that appear disjoined at the head of a sura, where it stands alone at the opening of one and with ayn and sin at another.

Arabic was written by hand for a very long time after printing reached the lands where it was used, and the delay was neither accidental nor simply a failure to adopt a technique. Movable type suits a script whose letters have one shape each. Arabic letters have up to four, they join, and the joins are not mechanical: a well written line adjusts the length of a connecting stroke, stacks certain combinations, and treats the ligature of lam and alif as a single mark. Reducing that to a case of sorts meant either a very large font or an ugly page, and early European attempts at Arabic type produced both.

Printing in Arabic characters began in Europe in the sixteenth century, largely for the use of scholars and of Christian missions, and presses working in Arabic operated in the Ottoman lands from the eighteenth century. Copying by hand continued alongside them, and for Quranic manuscripts the manuscript remained the norm long after other books were printed, because copying was itself an act with religious weight and because the accuracy of the text was guaranteed by a trained scribe rather than by a compositor. Lithography offered a compromise that several traditions preferred: the page was written out by a calligrapher and then reproduced photographically, so the hand survived the multiplication. Much of the printing of Persian and Urdu was done this way, and nastaliq in particular resisted type entirely.

Digital typesetting returned to the problem and solved it differently, by having software choose the form of each letter from its neighbours at the moment of display. That is why an Arabic string stored as a sequence of abstract letters renders as connected writing, and why an isolated letter in a table is a citation form rather than a picture of how it appears in use.