He—may Allah have mercy on him—was asked:

“What of someone who says that vowel marks and dots are part of the speech of Allah, Blessed and Exalted? Is this true or false? What is the ruling concerning the letters: are they the speech of Allah or not? Explain this to us; may you be rewarded.”

He replied:

Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds. In the copies of the Quran written by the Companions, they neither added vowel marks to the letters nor dotted them, for they were Arabs who made no grammatical errors. Later, toward the end of the Companions’ era, when grammatical errors began to appear, people began adding dots and vowel marks to copies of the Quran. Most scholars consider this permissible, and this is one of the two positions reported from Ahmad. Some scholars considered it disliked, but the correct view is that it is not disliked, because there is a need for it.

There is no disagreement among scholars that vowel marks and dots have the same status as the written letters. The dots distinguish the letters from one another, while the vowel marks clarify the grammatical inflections, since these form an integral part of the utterance.

It is reported that Abū Bakr and ‘Umar said:

“Reciting the Quran with correct grammatical inflections is dearer to us than memorizing some of its wording.”

Thus, when a reciter recites:

“Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds,”

the u, a, and i vowel sounds are an integral part of the Quran’s wording as pronounced. Since this is so, the ink used to write the vowel marks and dots is like the ink with which