Ward, I have a very good friend who lives in Jawa, and who is an Imam.He is a highly educated man and is widely respected for his ability to read Arabic scripts. What you have said above, he has also said to me, however, with one addition:- where the script has been written by a person who does not have a high level of learning, or skill, it can result in forms that are incorrect. If the passage is from Al-Qur'an, this is not usually a problem, because once the passage has been identified, the illegible words will be known.
Often we find inscriptions on the reverse of keris scabbards and their metal covers. Sometimes these are in Javanese---which can also present problems with script---but perhaps as often the inscriptions are supposed to be Arabic, and nearly always the incorrectly formed script presents problems that result in a guessing game.
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4th July 2008, 12:02 AM
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