Islamic calligraphy

In China, Korea and Japan, printing with movable type was a less revolutionary development than paper or block printing. The most obvious explanation is that ideographic writing systems required tens of thousands of typefaces in order to print the full vocabularies of these languages. The explosive impact of typography in the Western world is at least partly explained by the inherent advantages of alphabetic languages for printing with moveable type. When only a few dozen typefaces are needed for upper and lower case letters and punctuation marks, the advantages of moveable type become fully apparent.

Viewed from this perspective, the reluctance of the Islamic world to embrace typography represents something of a paradox. Arabic, like Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, is an alphabetic language. The Arabic alphabet was adopted as a writing system for many of the languages within the Islamic world, including Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, Dari, Malay, Kurdish, Pashto, Baluchi, Kashmiri, and Sindhi. Given the importance of the written word to Islamic culture, the Muslim world avidly adopted paper from 751 CE onward. Yet no similar reception awaited printing with moveable type. Instead, the Islamic world acted for centuries as a buffer between China and the arrival of this technology in the Latin West.

It is impossible to understand this paradox without some appreciation of the importance of the written word in general and calligraphy (from Greek kalligraphia, from kalligraphos ‘person who writes beautifully’) throughout the Islamic world.

Perhaps the best set of resources for understanding this topic are found in Calligraphy Qalam: An Introduction to Arabic, Ottoman and Persian Calligraphy. The most convenient pathway through this material is provided by the series of Frequently Asked Questions. Perhaps the best point of departure for understanding the religious grounding of the art for is the brief video below on The Islamic Context of Arabic Script Calligraphy.

See also the resources linked from The History of Islamic Calligraphy provided by Asian Education. On the related topic of Calligraphy and Islamic Art, further resources are provided by the Victoria and Albert Museum. See also Maryam D. Ekhtiar, How to Read Islamic Calligraphy (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018).

Credit: Howard Hotson (May 2019)