Arabic Calligraphy Art

This is why this first lesson is unusually lecture-like. However, even Arabic speakers may find here something they didn't know before, as we don't necessarily learn much about the script itself in school or daily life.

What I aim to teach in this new series of lessons is not the traditional flowing scripts that the words arabic calligraphy tutorials evoke. As beautiful as they are, they are very formal, and it takes a long and repetitive apprenticeship to learn to draw them properly, and even longer to be able to express oneself with them ("Make patient imitation your habit", said Ibn al-Bawwâb, one of the great names of the art).

Only a handful of people in the world, today, do this at all; most practitioners are content with using what they learned as they learned it, while large numbers of arabic calligraphy tutorials students, I have observed, lose interest long before they have put in enough practice to make anything of it.

This is not a criticism of this traditional approach: it is very beautiful, and it suits many—but not all. For those who want to use Arabic calligraphy (which I'll refer to as khatt) in creative ways, I have put this course together, a web adaptation of the one I teach in London.

The course content is entirely original, as I have crystallized it from my own practice, the basis of which I acquired from a non-traditional master who taught no theory at all but put me to work for many years until this material was second nature. It may not, therefore, intersect with any official courses taught by calligraphers with an official license (ijâza).

The aim of the series is not to teach you how to faithfully imitate forms, but to give you an understanding of the letters and how they are put together, so that you can then create with them and make them your own, as I have done. To this end, we will be working with the Kufic script.

Kufic vs. Rounded Scripts: A History

Arabic calligraphic scripts can be divided into two great families: the so-called rectilinear scripts (Kufic), and the cursive or round scripts. Although Kufic is too often presented as if it were a single, specific script among the rest, that is a mistake, and it can be only be reduced to a formula in an artificial way. To clarify this, I will briefly describe the respective history of these two families and explain their fundamental differences. (Note that all the names by which we designate the scripts are applied in retrospect. Period sources used them more fluidly if at all.)

Birth of the Rectilinear Scripts
In pre-Islamic days, writing was known to the peoples of the Arabian peninsula, and a rudimentary Arabic script was in use. It was rudimentary because they had little use for it, being a culture with a strong oral tradition, and the earliest texts that have come to us show all the awkwardness of a system that hasn't yet found its legs.

Then, almost overnight, they found themselves in the possession of something that needed to be preserved not only word for word, but down to the pauses between the words. That was the Qur'an, and it required a worthy transcription, with Arabic acquiring a special status, being seen as the language God chose for His revelation. The letters of the alphabet were now magical beings since they were capable of holding and preserving the divine Word.