Arabic calligraphy: the reed pen, the Quran and the art of the letter

«Nun. By the pen and what they write»: with these words opens the sixty-eighth sura of the Quran, named after the qalam, the scribe's reed pen. Another sura, among the first revealed according to tradition, recalls that God taught man by means of the pen. In a culture that regards the Quran as divine speech, transcribing that speech beautifully became one of the highest forms of art and devotion.

From Nabataean to Kufic

The Arabic alphabet derives from the script of the Nabataeans, the people of Petra, which in turn descended from Aramaic. Some pre-Islamic inscriptions, such as that of Namara from 328 AD, show the Arabic language still written in Nabataean characters; others, such as those of Zabad and Harran in the sixth century, already document forms close to Arabic. The definitive alphabet has twenty-eight letters, many of which are distinguished only by the presence and number of dots.

The earliest Quranic manuscripts on parchment often use an angular and solemn style called Kufic, after the city of Kufa in Iraq. The letters are stretched horizontally and the leaves are usually wider than they are tall. One of the oldest dated monumental Islamic inscriptions is found in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, completed in 691 or 692, where a long mosaic band carries Quranic verses.

The rules of proportion

A decisive turning point is attributed to Ibn Muqla, an Abbasid vizier who died in 940. According to tradition, he established a system of proportions based on the rhomboid dot made by the tip of the pen and on the height of the letter alif: every letter had to have precise measurements in relation to these modules. Cursive scripts, until then used mainly in documents, thus acquired dignity and regularity.

His work was perfected by Ibn al-Bawwab, who died in 1022, a famous Quran by whom, copied in Baghdad around the year 1000, is kept in Dublin at the Chester Beatty Library. Later Yaqut al-Musta'simi, who died at the end of the thirteenth century, codified the so-called «six pens», six canonical styles including thuluth, monumental and elegant, and naskh, clear and legible, still used today for printing the Quran.

Writing that becomes architecture

In the Ottoman Empire calligraphy reached very high prestige. Shaykh Hamdullah, who died in 1520, a master at the court of Sultan Bayezid II, was revered by later calligraphers as the founder of a school. In Persia nastaliq took hold, a flowing and slanting script preferred for poetry. Calligraphers handed down the art from master to pupil with a diploma, the ijaza, which guaranteed the continuity of the tradition.

In mosques and palaces, from the Alhambra in Granada to the mosques of Istanbul, Quranic verses and the names of God and the Prophet run along walls, domes and portals. In religious settings Islam has generally avoided depicting living beings, and writing has taken on the role that in other traditions belongs to sacred images: making the presence of the divine visible.

For the traditional calligrapher the beauty of the letter is not ornament but a form of respect. Every stroke of the pen, every proportion between alif and dot, is considered an act of attention towards the transcribed text, and the page thus becomes the place where art, faith and discipline meet.