Will Computers Make Extinct The Last Of Islam's Proud And Honourable Calligraphers? (Robert Fisk in The Independent)

The work of a student of Arabic calligraphy, using bamboo pens (qalams) and brown ink, tracing over the teacher's work in black ink.

Saturday, 12 November 2011

    Tripoli in northern Lebanon is an overwhelmingly Muslim city and Naja has a PhD in Islamic studies. But he is also a calligrapher and the black packet contains his pens and brushes. "Now, Robert, take these two pencils and drop them on the floor." I do. One sounds low and hollow. The other sounds high and brittle. "The higher the note, the better the pencil," he says.

   Calligraphy is an Islamic rather than a mere Arabic form of art, partly because Muslims disapprove of the human image in religious work. Iran has at least 200 calligraphers but in Beirut, it is a dying art – Naja is one of 10 authentic calligraphers left – and the computer is slowly destroying these craftsmen. Naja picks a sheaf of glossy, bright pages and a tiny inkpot and his pens and pencils scream over the surface as if they are alive, louder than chalk on a blackboard.

Koran portfolio in Kufic-style calligraphy, 11th century, Smithsonian 

   I am reminded of illuminated bibles, for these are letters and words in the nearest you can get to pictures. Naja copies out a sura from the Koran and his pen screams and squeaks and screams, his script moving up and down the page, bottom to top, measured in the number of little "diamonds" – five at the most – and their place within and below the consonants, usually indicating vowels. In the past, this was also the language of government, of Ottoman Firmins and of authority. The ink is special, and they say it smells of oranges.

   Naja calls his work "the trade of honour", and I realise at once that 200 years ago, anyone who was literate would want to write like this, not only a proof of power, but of learning. How typical that our laptops are now destroying the literacy of the past. Naja still copies the text of the Koran and his eyes narrow in concentration. It is script and art and religion rolled into one. Who would today ever copy out the Bible by hand? I think of Lindisfarne, and the Book of Kells lying now in the great library of my old university of Trinity College, in Ireland.

Sample of Calligraphy in Persian Nasta'liq Script, 1500-1600, Brooklyn Museum

   "Calligraphy cannot be learned immediately – and it is a hobby as well as a practice," Naja says. "There are Christian calligraphers, though not many. The script is hidden in revealing itself to the teacher. How can I explain it to you? My father was my first teacher. Then I travelled to Turkey, Egypt and many Arab countries, and I would learn, little by little, to create this experience." I wonder if, in fact, calligraphy is a linguistic version of singing. Naja gives me a sidelong glance. "Given that the Koran is not poetry or regular when writing it, reading it is not as regular as singing. It has its own identity."

   The Prophet, famously, was himself illiterate – his words were copied down later – but Naja adds that "illiteracy does not mean lack of education – the Prophet was wise and spoke to calligraphers". In olden times, they would receive a certificate of calligraphy, a practice that has now largely disappeared, although Naja himself has won international awards in calligraphy and has been a judge of calligraphic art. The Diwani script in which he is writing was developed under the Ottoman empire and perhaps the most famous calligraphy – still found on old fountains in Beirut – is the Ottoman official seal.

   Naja is a serious man – you'd have to be to write like this – but he enjoys life as a university professor in Beirut. "I pray, of course, but I am an open person. I enjoy all countries and all civilisation. Islam is a moderate religion, not a fundamentalist one. It is a mix and an integration of civilisations."

Koran page written in Naskh cursive script. Each verse is separated by an ayah marker consisting of a gold six-petalled rosette with blue and red dots on its perimeter. Mamluk, Egypt, 1300-1400, Library of Congress.

       

    Alas, that will not maintain the calligraphers of the Middle East. Some earn their living today (though not Naja) by writing out restaurant menus or inscribing dinner menus for presidents. It seems a sad outcome of centuries of art, although Naja will be going for many years yet. And then I look at my own notes of our interview, in shabby pencil, in handwriting I can scarcely read. This is what writing with a computer has done for me. I have started to write not letters and words but the imitation of words, pictures of words where I now have to second-guess missing letters. I suspect this is because the laptop allows me to think faster than I can write and when I return to pencil, my words trip over each other.

   Naja has started work on another sheet of paper and the screaming pen begins again. Then I realise there is a silk ribbon through the pen and that is what is screaming, the ink running on to the material and the pressure of the pen is applied to the silk. I slowly read as he writes. R-Wow-Bay-R-T-F-Yay-Sin-Kaf. "Robert Fisk," it says in Arabic. And he writes his own name in tiny letters beneath: "Jamal Naja, Tripoli, on 5/11/2011."

NOTE: Although I often (I would say mostly) disagree with the journalism of Robert Fisk, who writes in The Independent (London), I always read him because he is more intelligent and knowledgeable than most journalists covering the Middle East and because his passion and love for Middle Eastern culture supplements and, to some extent, moderates his driven and vituperative political views.  This article about the demonstrable decline and probable eventual extinction of the ancient and honorable art of Islamic calligraphy needed to be written, is extremely enjoyable, and should, I think, be read in its entirety because of the way Fisk links the passing of elegant calligraphy to the decline of handwriting in general as a direct result of the introduction of laptop computers into our lives.  My own personal "connection" to the piece comes through my former life as an Islamic art graduate student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where I was fortunate to study with the great scholar Dr. Richard Ettinghausen.  My involvement in the field derived from my high school interest in Sufism (Islamic mysticism) and I originally approached art as more of a words/writing person than a visual one.  Islamic calligraphy, a visually rich, intellectually edifying and complex subject, helped to transform the way I looked at and studied art.  I hope readers unfamiliar with this subject and with Fisk's writing enjoy this.  Happy Sunday.  P.S. My own handwriting would, if I were a legend, be considered legendarily awful.

Dr Jamal Naja meets me in a coffee shop just down the road from his home in Alamuddin Street, a quiet almost mischievous face, greying hair, and he lays – with great care – a black packet on the table in front of him.

The First Mogul

      

Babur:  Detail from unidentified Mogul miniature painting.

        Judged by human standards, it was humanism within limits.  The Timurid Renaescence, like ours, took place in the fifteenth century, owed its course to the patronage of princes, and preceded the emergence of nationalist states.  But in some respect the two movements differed.  While the European was largely a reaction against faith in favour of reason, the Timurid coincided with a new consolidation of the power of faith.  The Turks of Central Asia had already lost contact with Chinese materialism; and it was Timur who led them to the acceptance of Islam, not merely as a religion, for that was already accomplished, but as a basis of social institutions.  Turks, in any case, are not much given to intellectual speculation.   

       Timur’s descendants, in diverting the flow of Persian culture to their own enjoyment, were concerned with the pleasures of this world, not of the next.  The purpose of life they left to the saints and theologians, whom they endowed in life and commemorated in death. But the practice of it, inside the Mohammedan framework, they conducted according to their own common sense without prejudice or sentiment except in favour of rational intelligence.

 

Rear view of Babri Mosque, Ayodhya, India.  Built by Babur in 1527 and destroyed in a riot in 1992.

        The quality of mind thus fostered is preserved in the Memoirs of Babur, which were written in Turki at the beginning of the sixteenth century and have been twice translated into English.  They show a man concerned with day-to-day amenities, conversation, clothes, faces, parties, music, houses and gardens, as with the loss of a princedom in Oxiana and the acquisition of an empire in India; as interested in the natural world as the political, and so remarking such facts as the distance swum by Indian frogs; and as honest about himself as others, so that in this picture of himself – so real that even in translation one can almost hear him speak – he has left a picture of his whole line.  Born in the sixth generation after Timur, it was not until the end of his life that he conquered India and became the first Mogul.  Even that was only second-best, after he had spent thirty years trying to re-establish himself in Oxiana.   

A miniature painting from the Babur-nama (The Memoirs of Babur)

        But as a man of taste he did what he could to make life possible in so odious a country, and his comments on it show the standards he aspired to.  He thought the Indians ugly, their conversation a bore, their fruit tasteless and their animals ill-bred; “in handicraft and work there is no form or symmetry, method or quality . . . for their buildings they study neither elegance nor climate, appearance nor regularity.”  He denounces their habits as Macaulay denounced their learning, or as Gibbon denounced the Byzantines, by the light of a classical tradition.  

       And since that tradition, after the Uzbeg conquest of Oxiana and Heart, was extinguished elsewhere, he set about planting it anew.  He and his successors changed the face of India.  They gave it a lingua franca, a new school of painting and a new architecture. They revived again that theory of Indian unity which was to become the basis of British rule.  Their last emperor died in exile at Rangoon in 1862, to make way for Queen Victoria. And the posterity of Timur survives to this day, in poverty and pride, among the labyrinths of Delhi.

Farrukh Beg, A drunken Babur returns to camp at night, 1589


Reader Note:   Recent re-reading of Robert Byron's The Road To Oxiana (London, Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1937), the source of the preceding text, has prompted all sorts of memories of my original exploration of Islamic art, which began in high school after learning about Sufi mystical traditions and continued through college and graduate school, finally culminating in writing a Qualifying Paper concerning the Mughal painter Manohar that was accepted toward the awarding of an M.A. degree at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where I was fortunate enough to study under Dr. Richard Ettinghausen near the end of his long, illustrious career.  One can only sketch a fragment and open up a small glimpse into Mughal genius here, but for those living near big cities with fine museums, consulting primary sources -- the paintings themselves -- first always provides the best introduction, which can then be supplemented by reading history, viewing photographs, and possibly even researching the opinions of bloggers.

Babur, the first Mogul, was born in 1483 and died in 1531.  As Byron notes, we know a great deal about the remarkable events of his life from his autobiography, The Baburnama or Memoirs of Babur, which are considered the first true autobiography in Islamic literature.  

From Wikipedia: "Babur is said to have been extremely strong and physically fit. He could allegedly carry two men, one on each of his shoulders, and then climb slopes on the run, just for exercise. Legend holds that Babur swam across every major river he encountered, including twice across the Ganges River in North India. His passions could be equally strong. In his first marriage he was "bashful" towards ʿĀʾisha Ṣultān Begum, later losing his affection for her.  Babur also had a great passion to kill people, cut heads of people and create pillars out of cut head. He claimed to have created several such pillars in his autobiography. 

He gave up drinking alcohol only two years before his death for health reasons, and demanded that his court do the same. But he did not stop chewing narcotic preparations, and did not lose his sense of irony. He wrote:

 

Everyone regrets drinking and swears an oath [of abstinence]; I swore the oath and regret that."

Miniature painting showing First Battle of Panipat, 1598