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 The Splendor of Islamic
Calligraphy
Abdelkebir Khatibi &
Mohammed Sijelmassi
Thames & Hudson
Paperback
Quarto, 237 pages, 232 illustrated (98 in
color)
November 2001
Any type font designer can tell you
that the shape and form of a letter create a mood — just
compare Times Roman with Helvetica or imagine a wedding
invitation written in a script used for auto ads. But no
matter how footloose on a fancy street the designer may
become with decorativeness, type design is still at bottom
a utilitarian thing.
When the language is sacred, as the
Arabic used in the Quran is for Muslims, loftier
conventions apply. Islamic calligraphy is not based on
aesthetics or logic — although many of its scripts
certainly have that — but on what Muslims call tawqif,
language established by God. The word of God is the things
of God — if the word of God is heard in a tree, then the
tree is an act of God. The human voice is an instrument
for celebrating the creating immanence of God. Instead of
“to articulate is to create” as found in the Graeco-Roman
tradition, Islam operates on the principle, “to create is
to articulate”, and, of course, the Creator is God.
A person’s birth occurs in the context
of a language articulated by God. The infant learns the
ability to tune itself into the voice of the divine. As
the authors of The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy
put it, “Calligraphy is the plainsong of the divine.” As
this book so beautifully illustrates, Islamic calligraphy
is also a chant, a melody, an aria, a toccata, an
edification, an exaltation. This book shows just how
ignorant is the belief that Muslim culture is rigid,
monolithic, and anachronistic.
The Prophet never learned to read and
write. As the merchant he was before the prophecies began
to come, he probably used a calculation system still used
in vast stretches of the world today, in which the
fingers, knuckles, and web between the fingers designate
specific numbers; bargaining by two people who do not
speak the same language can occur simply by pointing out
the right sequence of fingers. Unlike tawqif, the
“secular” form of the Islamic language is called istilla — language fixed by human conventions.
Istilla is the language of commerce and poetry. It is not
much known outside of Islam, but poetry is considered the
most profound form of beauty after the Quran itself, and
far outshines prose as an expressive medium. Note the
emphasis on the word rather than the number as the
foundation stone for human interaction.
As in the West during the days of
troubadours and bards, Islamic poetry was committed to
memory and recited in exact or ever so slightly improvised
forms by their creators or readers. Long practice in the
skill of memorizing had resulted in a highly developed
capacity for verbal retention. Poetry was the Arabs'
primary aesthetic interest, and weekly markets and
seasonal fairs provided occasion for competitions between
poets. Vying for poetic — i.e., verbal — supremacy
generated a popular interest more passionate and
widespread than soccer or football matches do in our
times. Hence the Arabic language’s consummate spiritual
masterpiece — the Quran — was also a literary one. To this
day the country of Malaysia hosts an international Quran
reading competition which generates a per-capita TV viewer
ship in Muslim countries far exceeding the Super bowl in
the West. The prizes are token: a nicely printed Quran or
calligraphic epigram, but the prestige is enormous. And,
for those who still regard Islam as a monolith of
male-mindedness, women do participate and have won.
As poetry is for the tongue,
calligraphy is for the page. Muslim calligraphers were
doing marvels with form and content at roughly the same
time as Carolinian manuscript illuminators and T’ang
Dynasty ink brush artists were each in their own way
evolving a sense of writing style unique to their language
— ideograms, letters, pictographs. The Western style went
its own way by including images of humans and animals (and
God depicted as a human), thereby reviving the Greek and
Roman sense for imagistic art lost during the dark storms
of barbarism. Muslims and Chinese calligraphers largely
avoided the pictorial when they used their scripts,
thereby forging the linkage between poetry as a visual
art. The calligraphic line from Muslim reed pens led to
geometric stylization—best known in the arabesque — that
no other culture developed so exquisitely. Interlaced
design evolved, as did the use of polychrome for
diacritical marks (akin to dotting all the “i”s in red and
crossing the “t”s in blue), as did outline-form scripts
inside which other scripts are written — rather like every
letter in a word having its own words aside. In all of
these, the complex, interlaced, concatenated, multiplex
character of the Arabic mind shines clearly through
regional styles and forms.
From out of innumerable experiments and
primal urges, some styles proved more enduring. Up till
the early seventh century the letters of the Arabic
alphabet were written separately, like Hebrew. Gradually
rules were established for linking many of the Arabic
letters. A number of scripts for different styles of
writing developed. One of the earliest, developed in the
second half of the eighth century, was an angular style
named Kufi, so-named because it was devised in the city of
Kufah in what is now Iraq. For several centuries Kufi was
the preeminent script for copying the Quran. While its
regulation of form was important, far more important was
the adapting of it for artistic decoration on textiles,
ceramics, coins, utensils, epitaphs, and architectural
monuments. The written form of the language of God, when
applied to everyday objects, associated God’s
transcendence with the common lot activities of the world.
Hence the use of “theocratic” to describe the Muslim mind
is in error. The reality is that the mind — a merging
point of the personal, aesthetic, occupation, society,
economy, and polity — are all manifestations of the Will
of God and thus must obey God’s rules as set forth in the
Quran.
Kufi developed a complete and
regularized writing system. But except to the diehard
minimalist, it is not a very beautiful script. Early
calligraphers — who evolved out of the profession of
public scribe — soon set themselves to the task of
beautifying their scripts. By the late ninth century more
than twenty cursive styles were commonly used in addition
to several Kufi-based angular scripts. In the tenth
century, a famous calligrapher named Ibn Muqla (328-940)
systematized the writing of the proliferating variants of
cursive Arabic calligraphy. He saw the need for rules of
proportion common to any given letter in any script.
Letters were given precise measurements for their
vertical, horizontal, and curved strokes. The authors of
The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy sum up his role
eloquently:
“Ibn Muqla defines the general
principles of this discipline: clearly distinguish the
geometric forms according to their movement, horizontal,
vertical, oblique, and curved; keep the line steady but
relaxed when handling the pen so that the line shows no
sign of wavering.”
In one of history’s great ironies,
there exists not a single fragment known to be from Ibn
Muqla’s own hand (although there were many forgeries
penned by writers anxious to get their work read by the
authorities). Ibn Muqla was a political activist in a time
that didn’t much appreciate political activism. His letter
describing a plot against the Caliph was shown to the
Caliph, who rather disapproved of the notion. He had Ibn
Muqla’s hand cut off. So Ibn Muqla took up the pen with
his left hand and learned to write all over again, some of
it, again, incriminating letters. For some reason the
caliph decided not to sever Ibn Muqla’s left hand, but he
did take the precaution of cutting his tongue off. He
continued to write. He was thrown into prison and died
there.
Ibn Muqla as the designer of the
cursive, rounded script known as Naskhi. Distinguished by
its clarity, simplicity, and legibility, it gained favor
over Kufi for copying the Quran and spread to all regions
of the Muslim world. It is the proto-style from which came
most of the scripts one sees today. Each of the various
angular and rounded scripts has a distinguishing name (Thuluth,
Muhaqqaq, Maghribi. Riqa'i, Rayhani, and Tawqi' being just
a few). To the practiced eye they can be differentiated by
the hooked heads of verticals are made, the form of letter
endings, the compactness of the letters, the degree of
slant of the letters, the amount of horizontal or vertical
elongation, the degree of rounding of comers, and so on.
Unsurprisingly, an aesthetic philosophy
emerged to set all this in the largest possible context.
The calligraphic artist Rashid Qorashi stated that the
personality of the utterer is written inwardly before the
word is spoken. Hence the spoken sound—and its
calligraphy—is a search for pure sign. The word is a
painting, filled with desire and energy. Writing a word
sculpts the meaning of the word. Language is a laboratory
of tongues, not a domain of fixed meanings. We do not need
to know a language to be able to appreciate its script.
All this and more is set forth in a
book backed up with ultra-sharp large-format images, often
exceptionally close to the page (closer than the eye would
get) so the precise character of the strokes shines
through. The book’s designer understood the subject well:
it is not the word that conveys, it is the immanence of
God embodied in the word. Hence many of the illustrations
are gigantesque, seeming to invite the reader into them
rather than be appreciated as a shape on a page in a lap.
Alas, the Picky-Picky Patrol has to
note a few matters. The authors, being Maghribi from the
Mediterranean coast of Africa, make an overly strong case
for the beauty of the Maghribi script, with its strong
linear's, fluid curls, and deep descended. This leads to a
few notable absences. There is no mention at all of the
Jawi script of Southeast Asia, and the Sina script of
Muslim Asia. India with its fabulous tradition of Mughal
art and calligraphy, gets barely a nod. There are no
images of the scripts decorating the wonderful mosques of
nether Asia, e.g., the compressed Thuluth decorating the
dome of the Grand Mosque of Shah Alam in Malaysia. Nor is
there any mention of the Uzbeki calligraphic style with
its marvelous use of delicate pastels and very low relief
— for example, the lacelike mosque at Mukah of Sarawak
(Borneo). The off-white grisailles of the Hassan the 2nd
mosque in Casablanca deserve more than three images and a
tiny caption — if for nothing else the mosque’s complex
design style that embeds geometrics into stylized
floriations, inside which are Quranic phrases emerging
like the stamens in the heart of a blossom.
However, this carping is a blade of dry
grass in the fertile forest of the rest of the book. It is
a pity that the Western infatuation for Zen minimalism in
Japan, the paint brushy quality of Chinese pen-and-ink
work, and the wild colors of India have veered so many
eyes from an art form that combines all three.
The
Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy is a well splendid
place to start. Buy Now |
