The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy

by Abdelkebir Khatibi and Mohammed Sijelmassi
Thames & Hudson, New York, 1995/2008
240 pp., illus. 232 b/w, 98 col. Trade, £29.95
ISBN: 0-5000-1675-5.

Reviewed by Allan Graubard
New York, NY, USA

agraubard@yahoo.com



Calligraphy offers a looking glass in which we can marvel at what once was: this rendering of language with an artistry that, in large part, escapes us. Focused on precise meaning and immediate functionality, our books and documents provide us with what we need, not what we might desire visually. Now and then, of course, artist editions appear where the idiosyncratic displays its attractions in image, word and letter. But what of a tradition that extends through some nine centuries as an “all embracing cultural manifestation that structures the philosophical basis for language,” and that inspires music, art and architecture. This is how Abdelkebir Khatibi and Mohammed Sijelmassi portray Islamic calligraphy in their now republished work, The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy. And splendid it is: expertly written, lavishly illustrated, an enticing introduction to the field quite openly sensitive to the semantic and esthetic intermeshing that so much characterized written language in Islamic cultures prior to the dominance of the printing press.

Does not calligraphy appear from “the opening of a space between the statement contained in a phrase and its realization as a work of art”? Are not its proportions derived from the dot made by the nib of a reed pen from the pressure of the hand that wields it? When meaning conflates with gesture repositioning both within a literate, visual and aural context where resonance predominates and reading and delectation grow apace, we have calligraphy. At the same time, when a word becomes an image that is still readable as a word other values appear, including those that refer to divine or magical formulas.

According to the authors, Islamic calligraphy coheres through the application and vision of Ibn Muqla in the 9th century AD. That his right drawing hand was severed by decree along with his tongue, and who thereafter was known as the “thrice buried,” sustains the pedigree although nothing survives of his work. Thankfully his student, Ibn al-Bawwab, did not suffer the same fate, and the calligraphy we know evolves through various locales, histories and styles – beginning with the angular, geometric, sometime monumental Kufic then the rounded, cursive, sometime improvisational Naskhi – just briefly touched upon in the book.

Add to this the “richness in representing words and phrases,” the complexity of spatial relationships with scripts read vertically as well as from right to left, within circles, in mirror image back to back, or more fully revisioned as animals, birds and other natural forms, along with the arabesque of the signature (a minor art in itself), and appreciation turns, again, to wonder.

Certainly, as well, with the needs of empire, and scribes tasked to transmit official decrees and such, a secular element appears which, while not expressly devout, uses doctrine for political ends through a unique gestural logos that flowers, with great effect, up through Ottoman rule only to collapse under the onrush of modernity and mechanization.

Islamic architecture, of course, makes generous use of calligraphy, not as a factor intrinsic to the blueprint, but as a screen on which texts are projected -- as if the building were a book to be read as one lived or worked or practiced within it. The structure thus interpreted by a literate person seems a uniquely Islamic dispensation that in Europe takes a somewhat different, if more esoteric, turn – a subject of interest to this reviewer that the authors of the book avoid, and rightly so. But what, in fact, is the relation of the architectural “text,” most commonly depicted by statuary on the facades of the great medieval cathedrals and the profuse calligraphy on the facades of structures, say, in Al-Andulus initially in terms of legibility if not in terms of effect or intent? This question also resides in the qualities that image and language evoke, and an Islamic sensibility more attuned to concordances than to differences, which finds analogous extension through the body politic, the fate of competing or coterminous traditions, and the capacity for heterogeneity in various realms defined by power.

I recall an exhibition devoted to Ottoman calligraphy, with particular focus on statecraft, several years ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Large elaborately configured scrolls carried messages from Istanbul to provincial dignitaries. Excessive in design, brilliant in color, they spoke of governmental rituals that seemed all too unnecessary given the practicality of their content. The beauty of their execution, however, overwhelmed any misgivings I might have had standing before them. In other exhibitions, I have never ceased to dream within smaller, intricately drawn manuscripts where calligraphic and decorative or representational elements wove entrancing choreographies.

That this tradition continues within contemporary painting via the work of Muhammad Saber Fiuzi, Hossein Zenderoudi, Rashid Koraishi and others also prompts incisive commentary in the book at hand; this book of hands of artists and artisans who have brought Islamic expression to the margins of meaning and the treasures of resonance.

As a resource for further investigation, with its 233 illustrations (98 in color), The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy is now available once more, revised and expanded from the original 1976 edition.