Abstract
Since 2005, we have seen increasing interest in experimenting with Islamic calligraphy (i.e. calligraphy written in Arabic script) and the Arabic alphabet (which is used for writing many languages such as Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Kurdi, Urdu) in visual time-based media such as animation. At the same time, there has been a growing demand for creating temporal typography written in Arabic script for TV, cinema, and the web. In spite of the fact that both animated Arabic typography and time-based calligraphic artworks are on the rise, so far there has been no independent study on these topics that considers the morphology and specific qualities of Arabic script. Drawing upon some qualities of Arabic script and Islamic calligraphy that can be described as “proto-animated,” this book devises and theorizes five broad categories of temporal events for the Arabic system of writing and studies the influence of those temporal events on the process of meaning-making. This introductory chapter provides a brief background to this discussion, introduces the main goal of the book, and reflects on the significance of a theory of temporal behaviors for Arabic script in time-based media.
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Notes
- 1.
There are several reasons for this supreme status of calligraphy in Islamic visual culture. The three main reasons that recurrently appear in the literature on Islamic calligraphy are the importance of calligraphy in writing the Qur’an, the importance of the written word in Islamic culture, and the discouragement of figural representations in some Islamic teachings. Although the latter reason is widely disputed, its influence on the development of calligraphy as a supreme art form in the Muslim world cannot be completely ruled out. See Khajavi (2017) for more information.
- 2.
The Middle East, as David Elliot explained in his keynote speech at Tate Museum in January 2009, is “an alternative to the Western geographical conception of ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’” (as cited in Tanner, 2009, p. 16). It refers to a region spanning from North Africa to Arab countries, the Levant, Turkey, and Iran.
- 3.
Other terms are also used in reference to this trend and its artwork. In the Arab world for instance, the term “al-Madrasa al-Hurufiya ” (A. the school of letterism) is widely favored among art critics and art historians, as well as the general population. In Iran, these artworks are sometimes called naqqāshī-khat (P. calligraphy painting). In general, there seems to be no consensus over the name of this new trend or on its definition, as Blair (2006, p. 589) suggests.
- 4.
In Iran it is sometimes called Khat-akkāsī (literally, photo-calligraphy).
- 5.
The Jameel Prize is a prestigious international prize awarded to contemporary art inspired by Islamic heritage of various kinds. It is organized by the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in collaboration with Abdul Latif Jameel Community Initiatives (ALJCI), and it enjoyed the support of a well-known architect, the late Zaha Hadid (“About the Jameel Prize,” n.d.).
- 6.
The popularity of neo-calligraphy among artists and art consumers has its own explanations. For Muslim artists, neo-calligraphy provided a way to reinterpret a rather universally known Islamic (or in the case of the Arab or Iranian artists, a national) heritage in a modern artistic language, and thereby allowed them to claim their own identity within the language of modern art. From the audience’s perspective, these works are also interesting because neo-calligraphy presents a familiar artistic heritage in a different setting. This interest is not limited only to an audience familiar with Islamic calligraphy; neo-calligraphy also seems to be appealing to Western art consumers, as they find it relevant to modern abstract art. On top of these considerations, we should not forget that the recent popularity of neo-calligraphy has also been partly fueled by the commercial success of calligraphic art in such auction houses as Bonhams, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s, which, as Eigner (2015) suggests, have increased the exposure and value of Arab and Iranian modern art.
- 7.
Although screen media (in the form of the cinema screen) has been around for more than a century, the digital screen is a relatively new invention, which is constantly taking on different forms. In his book The language of new media, Lev Manovich (2001, pp. 95–103) provides a genealogy of screen media and categorizes three different stages in the development of screen technology: the classic screen, the dynamic screen, and the real-time screen. Anne Friedberg (2006) has added augmented space to Manovich’s genealogy as yet another stage of screen development. Aside from the first two types, the other two forms of screen media have been developed in the past few decades, and they have become omnipresent within perhaps only the past few years.
- 8.
For the sake of simplicity and clarity, the author distinguishes between media and materials in this book. The term “media” refers to the mode of artistic expression, such as painting, sculpture, animation, and so on, whereas the term “materials” refers to the means of artistic creation: for example, acrylic, watercolor, oil on canvas, and so on in the case of painting; bronze, clay, wood, and so on in the case of sculpture.
- 9.
According to the Online Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, n.d., http://www.oed.com/ [accessed August 27, 2018]), morphology in the linguistic context refers to “[t]he structure, form, or variation in form (including formation, change, and inflection) of a word or words in a language.” Although the term is not commonly used in the literature on typography, Nemeth (2017, p. 15) borrows it from linguistics to describe “the rule-based characteristics of word formation, letter variation, and vocalization found in the Arabic script.”
- 10.
In Arabic for designers: An inspirational guide to Arabic culture and creativity, aside from these three differences between the two scripts, Boutros (2017, pp. 44, 45) identifies five other discrepancies, including lack of upper case in Arabic, differences in the positioning and function of the baselines, and differences in ascenders and descenders.
- 11.
Printing press and typography arrived, were accepted, and were developed in the Islamic world rather late (Balius, 2013, p. 74). This lateness could be attributed to two main considerations. First, early printed manuscripts could not compete with the beauty of a skillfully inscribed and written calligraphic text, with all its exuberant nuances. For instance, in Arabic writing, letters physically connect to each other to create words, and can take different shapes according to their place within a word. So, “a master of calligraphy would teach his pupils various ways of connecting the letter to others,” as the Iranian artist Reza Abedini explains to Dana Bartelt (2006, p. 81). Therefore, a calligrapher is not only concerned with the shapes of single letters, but also the ways in which they connect to each other. Clearly, owing to the limitations of the printing technology being used, these delicate nuances are to a large degree disturbed in print and typography. In fact, one of the main challenges of designers today is to develop typography that, while meeting the requirements of the print and digital layout, also respects the splendor of Islamic calligraphy. Second, “the close link between religion and writing (calligraphy script) is a major reason for understanding the delay in the introduction of the printing press in the Islamic countries” (Balius, 2013, p. 75). In the sixteenth century the Venetian publisher Paganino Paganini and his son Alessandro made a printed Qur’an to profit from selling it in Ottoman Istanbul. However, having failed to take into consideration possible opposition to a printed Qur’an in the Muslim world, they did not sell it successfully (Carboni, 2007, p. 317). Aside from the errors in its text, the printed Qur’an, unlike one that is inscribed by the hand of a skillful calligrapher, was not accepted because it was believed not to be sacred, as it missed its link to the Divine (Marks, 2010a, p. 230). So, as Osborn (2008) asserts, Arabic typography and Islamic calligraphy are historically two “different modes of textuality” (p. 217). For more information on the obstacles of adopting Arabic script to print see Smitshuijzen Abifares (2001), Nemeth (2017), and Boutros (2017).
- 12.
Similar studies have been done on the behavior of Roman typography in time-based media. These studies try to establish principles for the efficiency of meaning-making in screen typography (Kenna, 2012; van Leeuwen & Djonov, 2015), survey new and innovative ways of dealing with text in screen media (Bellantoni & Woolman, 2000), or examine various temporal behaviors and the consequences of adding motion to type (Brownie, 2012a, 2012b; Hillner, 2005, 2006, 2009; Kac, 1995). Although calligraphy and typography, and Arabic and Roman scripts are different, they share similarities (for example, in the case of the scripts, they are both linguistic signs), and such studies come to inform this research. Similar scholarly research can be found on the Chinese tradition of calligraphy. Zhi-Ming Su’s (2010) doctoral thesis, for instance, explored how the gestural movement of Chinese calligraphy can inform animation.
- 13.
Although the terms “proto-animated” and “proto-animation” are usually used to refer to pre-cinematic toys such as the zoetrope or flipbook (Ledesma, 2012; Tohline, 2015), in the context of this book these words have a different meaning. This book borrowed these two terms from Marks (2011), who used them in her article “Calligraphic animation: Documenting the invisible” to refer to those qualities of Islamic calligraphy in some calligraphic artworks that renders them as animated and moving in spite of being static images. So, in the context of this book, the terms proto-animated/proto-animation refer to a static image which has a quality of aliveness or invokes a feeling of movement.
- 14.
The term “kinesthetic,” has been previously used in relation to the sense of motion induced by the brushstrokes of Chinese calligraphy (Gerdes, 2010). The term is also used in the fields of dance study and performance study to refer to the performers’ awareness of the movements of the parts of their bodies through sensory perceptions in the muscles and joints: see Dickinson (2014) and Ehrenberg (2015), for instance. Hence, this term is being used in this book to emphasize the dance-like quality of calligraphic forms and compositions.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
An alternative way of looking at the distinction between the two is proposed by Nemeth (2017), who sees all the various modes of representing Arabic script on a continuum of writing. On one side of this spectrum, he explains, exists mundane casual handwriting, whereas on its other ends is calligraphic art with all its artistry. Arabic typography, he argues, occupies the middle ground of this wide spectrum, aiming to communicate but still concerned with aesthetic quality. Calligraphy, in his formation, is primarily concerned with visual effect, and therefore rests closer to calligraphic art on the spectrum.
- 18.
The trend has other names in other places. In Iran, for instance, it is usually called naqqāshī-khat (Keshmirshekan, 2009).
- 19.
Keshmirshekan (2013) defines neo-calligraphy as “a modern approach to calligraphy” (p. 132). He originally used the term in relation to some of the works of artists from the Iranian Saqqa-khāneh movement, as well as calligraphic arts by Iranian artists that deviate from traditional calligraphy in one way or another. However, in a personal communication, he explained that he would “certainly use the term neo-calligraphy for various kinds of approaches toward Arabic-Persian scripts/calligraphic forms, insofar as they distance themselves from classical calligraphy” (H. Keshmirshekan, personal communication, 2015, February 24, Email).
- 20.
There are also other terms that have been used by different scholars in reference to neo-calligraphic works. Sheila Blair (2006) prefers to stick to a general term and calls such works “calligraphic art,” while in their book The splendour of Islamic calligraphy, Khatibi and Sijelmassi (1995) deploy the term “calligraphy-inspired” works. In Iran, works such as these are most often called naqqāshī-khat (Keshmirshekan, 2009).
- 21.
So, this definition is actually from Keshmirshekan (2013). Others have defined neo-calligraphy (or whatever terms they use to refer to these works) in quite different ways. Daghir (1990), for instance, defines Hurufiya “based on two principles. The first entails a complete break with the styles of traditional Arabic script, letters being viewed as plastic elements. The second principle involves the construction of a modern work of art capable of expressing a cultural particularity” (as cited in Shabout, 2007, p. 90).
- 22.
Not to mention that there are many examples of traditional calligraphy in which less emphasis is placed on the readability of the rendition. For instance, one can think of a practice sheet of Sīyāh-mashq (meaning, literally in Persian, “black-exercise”) in which the semantic meaning is secondary to the formal representation of calligraphy. Despite this, it can be argued that in traditional calligraphy, usually there is a tendency to give more currency to the clarity and legibility of the work.
- 23.
- 24.
Nastaʿliq and shikastih are two scripts (or styles of calligraphy) that are widely used in Iran, Pakistan, and part of India.
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Khajavi, M.J. (2019). Introduction. In: Arabic Script in Motion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12649-0_1
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