Islamic Calligraphy (Sheila Blair)

Sheila Blair's Islamic Calligraphy was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2006. Its publisher presents it as the first reference work on the art of beautiful writing in Arabic script, explaining how calligraphy became one of the main means of artistic expression from the seventh century to the present, from the far Maghrib to India and beyond, and offering a standardised terminology for identifying its styles. ^{1 2}

It opens with a preliminary part on the importance of writing in Islamic culture and the principles of Arabic script, and on materials: supports, special papers, pens and pen cases, inks and inkwells. The rest follows five periods on Hodgson's framework: Arabic script in early Islamic times to about 900 CE, with early Qur'an manuscripts and the methods of dating them; the pre-eminence of round scripts from 900 to 1250, with broken cursive, Ibn Muqla, Ibn al-Bawwab and maghribi script; the emergence of regional styles from 1250 to 1500 — the Six Pens and hanging scripts in Iran, rectilinear and curvilinear scripts under the Mamluks; the dynastic styles of the Safavids, Qajars, Ottomans, Mughals and Africa; and the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from traditional styles to typography, computer graphics and calligraphic art. ^{3 4 5 6}

The author usually places Iranian material before Arab or Turkish, and calls this a deliberate value judgement: in her view calligraphers in the eastern Islamic lands were often more innovative — the Six Pens practised by Yaqut emerged in Iran before the Mamluk lands, and the hanging scripts were developed for Persian and then taken up by the Ottomans. She notes that early sources give many script names without illustrating them, and that the first surviving source giving both names and examples is al-Tayyibi's volume compiled for Sultan Qansawh al-Ghawri in 908/1503 — so for more than nine hundred years there is no surviving sample of a named script. ⁷

Its examples are chosen from dated or datable pieces of secure provenance, because forgeries and copies, medieval and modern, are rampant, and each illustration comes with an analysis of what to look for in judging style and quality. ¹