The written Qur’an includes in its history a centuries-long period in which the scripture was assigned an exclusive script – a script to be used only for writing the Word of God. This Qur’anic script, called Kufic, has been approached by modern scholars primarily as a means of dating Qur’ans copied between the late eighth and tenth centuries. Beyond chronology, scholars have commented only on the defective nature of the script as a means of transmitting the Qur’anic text. The complete lack of diacritical marks, combined with the grouping of letters by connectivity rather than by words, have prompted scholars to assume that Qur’ans written in the Kufic script could not have been used except as an aide de memoire for people who had already memorized the entire scripture. This paper argues that the Kufic phase of Qur’an production was, in part, a response to an increased and more systematic use of the written scripture. Use of the Kufic script coincided with the development of the Qur’anic sciences of tafsir (Qur’an exegesis) and Islamic law. I have examined dozens of Qur’an manuscripts from this period, and by tracing the development of ornamentation in these codices, this paper demonstrates that as “unreadable” as the script may seem, the Qur’an during this period was read in increasingly complex ways. Qur’an manuscripts are uniformly un-paginated, and ornamentation in the text, I argue, was emplaced primarily as navigational aids for readers using the codices for multifaceted tasks such as the articulation of Islamic law. I demonstrate that the proliferation of ornamentation over time, such as division of the verses into groups of fives and tens, was necessary for the new uses to which the written Qur’an was put. Despite the traditional “ideal” of the primacy of orality, I demonstrate an increasing reliance on the use of the written Qur’an by medieval scholars. For instance, in his Muwatta, Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) repeatedly references the use of the written scripture during legal debates. References to the use of Qur’an codices in scholarly circles increased considerably a generation later as reflected in the Fada’il al-Qur’an by Abu Ubayd al-Qasim (d. 838). By tracing the development of Qur’an codices in the context of the growth of two religious sciences in the eighth and ninth centuries, this paper provides new insight into the twin disciplines of History of the Book and its sister field, the History of Reading.