Ha ه

Ha is the twenty-sixth letter of the modern Arabic order and the fifth of the older abjad order, from which it takes the numeral value five. It has four forms that share almost nothing: a small loop with a rising stroke at the beginning of a word, a figure like a small eight or a knot in the middle, a rounded shape on the line at the end, and a plain circle or teardrop in isolation. Learners are usually taught the four separately.

Ha is a moon letter, so the lam of the definite article is pronounced before it. Its sound is the plain glottal h of English, made with no constriction in the throat, and it is a different letter from the pharyngeal ha that stands sixth in the modern order. English transliteration writes both with h, which is why two quite distinct Arabic letters look the same in roman spellings of names and why scholarly transliteration marks one of them with a dot beneath.

Its name descends from the Northwest Semitic he, the cognate of Hebrew he and Syriac he, whose sense was window, and it holds the numeral value five that Hebrew he holds.

The final form of this letter, marked with two dots above, is ta marbuta, the ending that closes most feminine singular nouns. It is not counted as a twenty-ninth letter and has no numeral value of its own, and it is pronounced as a t or as a light h according to whether the word carries its case ending. Ha is also one of the fourteen letters that appear disjoined at the head of a sura.

Because the Arabic script carries scripture, a sheet of Arabic writing is not treated as an ordinary piece of paper. Where a page bears the name of God, or verses of the Quran, common practice across the Islamic world is that it should not be thrown out with household waste, walked on, or used to wrap goods. What should be done with it instead varies by place and by school: burial is widely practised, storage in a mosque or a designated repository is common, and burning is accepted by some authorities and rejected by others. Purpose built collection points for worn copies and printed sheets exist in many cities.

The same reasoning shapes handling. Copies of the Quran are conventionally shelved above other books, opened with the hands ritually clean, and not placed on the floor. These are matters of custom and of law, with real variation between schools and regions, and describing them is not the same as prescribing them.

The concern is old and it left physical traces. Storerooms in which superseded and worn manuscripts were set aside rather than destroyed have preserved material that would otherwise be lost, and the practice has parallels in neighbouring traditions: the Jewish genizah, whose Cairo deposit is the most consequential example for historians, rests on the same instinct about writing that carries a divine name.

Two things follow for an atlas. The first is that the script is not a neutral vehicle in this tradition, and an account of the letters that leaves that out has left out the reason calligraphy took the place it did. The second is that describing a devotional practice is where a reference work stops. What is owed to a written page is a question for the tradition and its scholars, not for a catalogue.