Category Archives: Calligraphy

The Quran as a Great Book: Muslim Perspectives, 3

Calligraphy, Islam: Introduction, Qur'an


A 9th- or 10th-century leaf of the Qur’an in Kufic script


[The following is part three of a series on a lecture presented in the Hofstra Great Books Series on December 5, 1993. For part two, click here.].

1. Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds

If there is a phrase in Arabic as frequently used as the bismillah, it is no doubt the hamdillah. Since God is perfect, God alone has the right to receive praise from humanity. God deserves this verbal praise because this mercy comes of his own volition; it was not forced, it was freely given. We are also reminded in these opening words that God rules; he is the rabb of the worlds that be. The word rabb in Arabic has a number of related connotations, including master or lord, chief, determiner, provider, sustainer, rewarder, and perfector. The worlds, perhaps better rendered straightforwardly as the universe, indicated here encompass the material and the immaterial, of flesh-and-blood and of spirits, of those who are well guided and those who are misguided. Whatever is, God is the ultimate master of it. While a non-believer might read this as a base for fatalism, a Muslim sees it differently as a fundamental reason for hope. God’s will will be done, but this hardly frees the believer from doing his or her part, particularly when no one can speak definitively as to what God’s will is in a given matter. The meaning of Islam, after all, is submission.

2. The Compassionate, the Merciful

3. Master of the Day of Judgement

The term malik is that which is used in Arabic for the master of a slave, the owner of property, and the king or sole ruler. For the Muslim, God is the ultimate master of all things. He is not just a judge dispensing justice; God renders reward and punishment (the implication of judgement day) because He alone is the authentic source for such judgement. Who else has this kind of authority, but the one who creates everything and sustains everything? We are reminded quite literally as well that Islam preaches a final judgement, one beyond the grave, a future resurrection of the dead – an idea hardly unique to this revelation. But the Muslim is consoled by the realization that no matter how bad things are (and in many Muslim countries, things are pretty bad right now) God will be the ultimate judge. Continue reading The Quran as a Great Book: Muslim Perspectives, 3 →

The Quran as a Great Book: Muslim Perspectives, 2

Anthropology/Sociology, Calligraphy, Islam: Introduction, Qur'an


Quran in Naskhi script written by the celebrated Turkish calligrapher Hamd Allah (15th century, Topkapi Museum


[The following is part two of a series on a lecture presented in the Hofstra Great Books Series on December 5, 1993. For part one, click here.].

So why am I here?

Let me begin with my discipline. I am an anthropologist by training and experience and a life-long student of Arabic (as a dynamic language and as an extraordinary corpus of folklore and formal literature). You may wonder why an anthropologist would stand before you to discuss a great book, an anthropologist who should seem to be more at home studying “primitive”, non-literate people (who can sadly boast of no “great books”.. Perhaps we should have a “Great Oral Traditions” series).

You see, as an anthropologist, I do not so readily discriminate between societies with books and societies technically without them. More specifically, as a cultural anthropologist, my ethnographic research (that is, my personal observations and documentation of what people do, say they do, or don’t do and think they should do) was in the Arab Islamic country of Yemen (located southwest of Saudi Arabia across the horn of Africa from more newsworthy Somalia). While many of the Yemeni men and women I knew in the field were not formally literate, they were clearly part and parcel of a religion of the book; as Muslims with an impressive local history they all related to the Quran as a vital text and they all (even if unschooled) knew by heart portions of the Quran, at a minimum the fatiha I recited at the start. To talk meaningfully about the Yemen I observed and studied and not to know something reasonably substantial about the Quran that Yemenis revere, would seem to me absurd, or at the very least the sloppiest sort of scholarship. Continue reading The Quran as a Great Book: Muslim Perspectives, 2 →

The Quran as a Great Book: Muslim Perspectives

Books You Should Read, Calligraphy, Islam: Introduction, Qur'an


The fatiha in an Arabic manuscript of the Quran


[The following is a lecture presented in the Hofstra Great Books Series on December 5, 1993].

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ

الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ
الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ
مَالِكِ يَوْمِ الدِّينِ
إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُ وَإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِينُ
اهْدِنَا الصِّرَاطَ الْمُسْتَقِيمَ
صِرَاطَ الَّذِينَ أَنْعَمْتَ عَلَيْهِمْ غَيْرِ الْمَغْضُوبِ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا الضَّالِّينَ

In the name of God, the infinitely Compassionate and Merciful.
Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds.
The Compassionate, the Merciful. Ruler on the Day of Reckoning.
You alone do we worship, and You alone do we ask for help.
Guide us on the straight path,
the path of those who have received your grace;
not the path of those who have brought down wrath, nor of those who wander astray.

What I have just recited in Arabic is the Quran’s opening or fatiha, consisting only of seven short verses, the first of some 114 chapters of varying length. This is the most oft repeated part of the Quran, recited daily by millions of Muslim men and women during each of the five regular prayers. So integral are these opening words in the revelation of Islam that they have been called the “essence” (literally “mother”) of the Quran (Umm al-Quran ), or as some say, “the Lord’s Prayer of the Muslims.” This fatiha is the opening salvo of a scripture revered as God’s most basic message by more than one billion people on earth today. For these Muslims, most of whom live outside the Middle East, the Arabic Quran is not only a great book but quite literally “the” great book. While non-believers would not approach this book as a true revelation, no one can deny that it is a scripture that has been influential in shaping history across continents for almost 15 centuries and will continue to influence the lives and politics of many of the world’s peoples for a long time to come.

My interest tonight in talking about the Quran differs somewhat from most of the lectures in this series. I feel no need to convince you as an audience in an academic setting that the Quran is a significant text, one of those few great books that we cannot afford to ignore. This is made even more poignant in light of the perceived threat by many in our society of a so-called “militant” Islam on the march against Western Civilization. In our collective cultural ignorance, the Quran is portrayed only as a manifesto, not because non-believers do not take the time to read it carefully but simply because Islam has been branded as a hostile and uncompromising worldview. Continue reading The Quran as a Great Book: Muslim Perspectives →

Islamic Manuscripts at Cambridge

Calligraphy, Islamic History, Islamic Sciences, Islamic Texts, Miniatures, Teaching Resources


The Cambridge Digital Library now has online access to some of their Islamic manuscripts. Details below, as described on the website:

Cambridge University Library’s collection of Islamic manuscripts dates from the origins of Arabic scholarship in Cambridge in the 1630s when the University founded a Professorship in Arabic and William Bedwell donated a Qur’an to the Library. Since that time the collection has grown in size and diversity to over 5,000 works, including the collections of Thomas Erpenius, J.L.Burckhardt, E.H.Palmer and E.G. Browne. These manuscripts shed light on many aspects of the Islamic world, its beliefs and learning.

The collection was further enriched over the centuries through the activities of scholarly collectors and skilled librarians, adding more depth to the already impressive range of manuscripts. Yet this extraordinary collection has remained relatively unknown outside Cambridge. Now we hope to draw better attention to its treasures through cataloguing and digitisation. We have collaborated with the Bodleian at Oxford and other research libraries to provide an online catalogue of the collection. We will be offering a selection of digitised manuscripts through the Foundations project and will seek funding for further digitisation. Continue reading Islamic Manuscripts at Cambridge →

Tabsir Redux: Opening the Qur’an

Calligraphy, Islam: Introduction, Qur'an


Note: The Qur’an can be divided into thirty equal parts. One part takes only twenty-four reading minutes, and the whole Book requires 12 reading hours. There are 114 chapters, and 6,236 Arabic verses (Abu ‘Amr Al-Dani in his book Al-Bayan), containing 77,439 Arabic words (reported by Al-Fadl bin Shadhan) made up of 371,180 Arabic letters (Abdullah b. Kathir reporting Mujahid, although there are different accounts). By contrast the King James Version of the Christian Bible (OT and NT) has 783,137 words and 3,566,480 letters. Muslims believe the Quran in Arabic is the actual Word of God given to Muhammad through a series of revelations from 610-632 C.E. and not written down as a “book” until after Muhammad died.

Given the general ignorance in American society of Islam, especially the theology based on the teachings in the Quran, it is important to go back to the beginning, the essence, the opening, the words that are by definition significant to all Muslims. This eloquent key is the opening (fatiha) of the text, a set of verses as repeated by Muslims daily as the Lord’s Prayer is by Christians. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Opening the Qur’an →

Arabic in Kufic Script

Archaeology and Antiquities, Books You Should Read, Calligraphy, Languages, Qur'an


Kufic Quran, second/eighth century

by John F. Healey and G. Rex Smith

The Kufic Quran has reached its fully developed form by the end of the second/eighth century. It was invariably written on parchment, the letters in a black ink with dots, often red and green (the latter used with initial hamza) though sometimes in gold only, representing short vowels, and black strokes, single and double, distinguishing letters. The text thus written is made difficult by the spacing which would seem to be more to do the calligrapher’s artistic inclinations and his desire to justify his text precisely than with Arabic orthography. “Justification” here refers to what became the standard practice in printed books of making the lines even in length both at the beginning and at the end of the lines. Verse endings and other pauses call for gold: usually a cluster of three balls, one sitting on two others and quite elaborate roundels. Continue reading Arabic in Kufic Script →

Wellcome Library Arabic Manuscripts Online

Calligraphy, Islamic History, Islamic Sciences, Islamic Texts, Languages, Literature, Maps, Miniatures, Teaching Resources

Historic Arabic medical manuscripts go online

Researchers may now search and browse the Wellcome Library’s Arabic manuscripts using groundbreaking functionalities in a new online resource that brings together rich descriptive information and exceptionally detailed images.

Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world, and now digital facsimiles of some of its most important texts have been made freely available online. The unique online resource, based on the Wellcome Library’s Arabic manuscript collection, includes well-known medical texts by famous practitioners (such as Avicenna, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn an-Nafis), lesser-known works by anonymous physicians and rare or unique copies, such as Averroes’ commentaries on Avicenna’s medical poetry.

The Wellcome Arabic Manuscript Cataloguing Partnership (WAMCP) combines the efforts of the Wellcome Library, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and King’s College London Digital Humanities Department and is funded by JISC and the Wellcome Trust. It offers a rich digital manuscript library available online for free, which represents a significant resource for a wide range of researchers – including Arabic studies scholars, medical historians and manuscript conservators – to aid and enhance their work.

The resource is now available online. Continue reading Wellcome Library Arabic Manuscripts Online →

Viewing the Shanamah in Manhattan

Calligraphy, Conferences and Talks, Iran, Languages, Literature, Miniatures, Poetry, Qur'an, Scholars, Sufism


Portrait of the infant Rustam shown to Sam (folio 30b)

On Thursday night I had the privilege of attending a reading of portions of the Shanamah by Iraj Anvar.
The reading was held as part of the superb series called “Illuminated Verses: Poetries of the Islamic World,” which is a series of readings and events that began in March with a lecture by Bruce Lawrence on the Quran and continues through May 7. This is an extraordinary opportunity to hear and learn more about the variety of poetic production in Islamic cultures worldwide.

While the reading of the Shanamah is over, you can still see the exhibit of the mid 15th century Muhammad Juki’s manuscript of the Shanamah at the Asia Society through May 1.