By Arabic script (or Qur'anic script) we mean the standardized alphabetical system extracted from the Arabic letters commonly referred to in West Africa as ajami, and in the South eastern Asia (precisely in Indonesia and Malaysia) the jawi script, while commonly referred to in Pakistan, India Kashmir Afghanistan and Iran as farisi inscription. Formerly, it was known in Turkey as ottomani alphabets.

Ever since the early days of Islam, non Arab Muslims started writing their languages using the Qur'anic script instead of the script thy used before Islam. This led to the invention of an extended alphabetical system. Although the original Arabic letters were still in use, some ones were modified by adding some dots or other technical marks so that they can be able to represent the inexistent sounds in Arabic language.

With the advent of computer technology, all types of the extended and standardized Arabic alphabetical system used for writing Muslim languages other than Arabic were embedded in this new technology and Asian Muslim languages began to exploit the technology with immediate effect. The African part of the experience is to be seen within the effort of the International University of Africa (IUA). The university has been the first to have officially computerized the Arabic Script system used for writing the African Muslim languages. In doing this, the university has adopted the alphabetical system proposed as the standard by the technical committee of the Islamic Scientific, Educational and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) and Islam Development Bank (IDB).

Although the script used in writing the African languages are modified, that did not create much discrepancy with the one used for writing Asian Muslim languages except in the letters that represent the African phonological sounds that do not exist in the Asian languages. Another new invention to the African script is the introduction of vowels which further simplified writing African languages with computer. This made it possible for all the languages to be written with the same standardized Qur'anic script and at the same time, to preserve the phonological characteristics of all the languages.