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Rasm (Arabic:رَسْم[ræsm]) is an Arabic writing script often used in the early centuries ofClassical Arabic literature (7th century – early 11th century AD). It is the same as today's Arabic script except for the difference that theArabic diacritics are omitted. These diacritics include consonant pointing orʾiʿjām (إِعْجَام), and supplementary diacritics ortaškīl (تَشْكِيل). The latter include theḥarakāt (حَرَكَات) short vowel marks—singular:ḥarakah (حَرَكَة). As an example, inrasm, the two distinct lettersص ض are indistinguishable becauseʾiʿjām is omitted, or letters similar in shapeک ك may also become indistinguishable if the diacritics are omitted.Rasm is also known as Arabic skeleton script. This concept is somewhat similar toscriptio continua in the Latin script, where all spaces and other punctuations is omitted. Therasm form was common for writing Arabic until the early 2nd millennium.

In the early Arabic manuscripts that survive today (physical manuscripts dated 7th and 8th centuries AD), one finds dots but "putting dots was in no case compulsory".^[1] The very earliest manuscripts have some consonantal diacritics, though use them only sparingly.^[2] Signs indicatingshort vowels and thehamza are largely absent fromArabic orthography until the 2nd to 8th century. One might assume that scribes would write these few diacritics in the most textually ambiguous places of the rasm, so as to make the Arabic text easier to read. However, many scholars have noticed that this is not the case. By focusing on the few diacritics that do appear in early manuscripts, Adam Bursi "situates early Qurʾān manuscripts within the context of other Arabic documents of the first/seventh century that exhibit similarly infrequent diacritics. Shared patterns in the usages of diacritics indicate that early Qurʾān manuscripts were produced by scribes relying upon very similar orthographic traditions to those that produced Arabic papyri and inscriptions of the first/seventh century." He concludes that Quranic scribes "neither 'left out' diacritics to leave the text open, nor 'added' more to clarify it, but in most cases simply wrote diacritics where they were accustomed to writing them by habit or convention."^[3]

Rasm means 'drawing', 'outline', or 'pattern' in Arabic. When speaking of theQur'an, it stands for the basic text made of the 18 letters without theArabic diacritics which mark vowels (taškīl) and disambiguate consonants (ʾiʿjām).

Therasm is the oldest part of theArabic script; it has 18 elements, excluding the ligature oflām andalif. 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 distinctglyphs each in the initial and medial positions.

At the time when theʾiʿjām was optional, letters deliberately lacking the points ofʾiʿjām:⟨ح⟩/ħ/,⟨د⟩/d/,⟨ر⟩/r/,⟨س⟩/s/,⟨ص⟩/sˤ/,⟨ط⟩/tˤ/,⟨ع⟩/ʕ/,⟨ل⟩/l/,⟨ه⟩/h/ — could be marked with a small v-shaped sign above or below the letter, or a semicircle, or a miniature of the letter itself (e.g. a smallس‎ to indicate that the letter in question isس‎ and notش‎), or one or several subscript dots, or a superscripthamza, or a superscript stroke.^[4] These signs, collectively known as‘alāmātu-l-ihmāl, are still occasionally used in modernArabic calligraphy, either for their original purpose (i.e. marking letters withoutʾiʿjām), or often as purely decorative space-fillers. The smallک‎ above thekāf in its final and isolated forms⟨ك  ـك⟩ was originally‘alāmātu-l-ihmāl, but became a permanent part of the letter. Previously this sign could also appear above the medial form ofkāf, instead of the stroke on itsascender.^[5]

Among the historical examples ofrasm script are the KuficBlue Qur'an and theSamarkand Qurʾan. The latter is written almost entirely in Kufic rasm.

The following is an example ofrasm fromSurahAl-A'raf (7),āyah 86 and 87, in the Samarkand Qur'an, and its digital equivalentrasm,rasm with normal spacing, and then fully vocalized with all diacretics:

Compare theBasmala (Arabic:بَسْمَلَة), the beginning verse of theQurʾān 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.

Rasm with spaces[c]	‍ ٮسم‌‌ ا ل‍ل‍ه ا لر حمں‌ ا لر حىم
Rasm only[c]	ٮسم ال‍ل‍ه الرحمں الرحىم
Iʿjām and all diacritics[c]	بِسْمِ ٱللَّٰهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
Iʿjām and rasm[c]	بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Basmala Unicode characterU+FDFD	﷽
Transliteration	bi-smi llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīmi

• Kufic
• Abjad numerals
• History of the Arabic alphabet
• Qiraʾat
• Scriptio continua, an analogous concept in the Latin script where all spaces and other punctuations is omitted.
• Decimal separator
• Modern Arabic mathematical notation
• Book Pahlavi, an Iranian script with similar graphemic convergence.

• Some pages from the famous Saint Petersburg-Samerkand-Tashkent Koran. The fourth to seventh images are written in theKufic script
• A page in the earliest scriptArchived 2020-10-20 at theWayback Machine, known asma'il

• Quranic orthography
• Arabic words and phrases
• Writing systems without word boundaries

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