On the Sacred Art of Qur’an Calligraphy and Illumination
The exhibition ‘The Spirit Illuminated’ is dedicated to the
late Dr. Martin Lings, Shaykh Abu Bakr Siraj ad-Din, whose
insight and teaching has guided and inspired the Thesaurus
Islamicus Foundation in all its work with the sacred arts of
the Holy Qur’an. He and his close colleague Titus Burckhardt
are arguably the most important Western Muslims authors to
write extensively on the subject of the sacred arts of
Islam. With these two authors must also be included
Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, whose essay ‘On the Harmony of the
Word’ has been written especially for this exhibition. It is
appropriate here to present some brief passages from two
works by these authors: ‘Splendours of Qur’an Calligraphy &
Illumination’ by Martin Lings, recently published by the
Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, and ‘Art of Islam’ by Titus
Burckhardt. It is hoped that these passages will furnish the
reader with certain keys to open up the inner dimensions of
the arts of calligraphy and illumination found in the
manuscripts and Editio Electrum Tradigital prints on
exhibition.
It is useful to
begin with some ever-timely reminders of Islam’s early
history from Martin Lings:
In the
sixth century A.D. the tribes of Arabia were poor,
disunited, often at war with each other, and little known to
the rest of the world. It was to a member of one of these
tribes that the Divine Revelation was given, and some years
later, in 620 A.D., having been rejected by the majority of
his people, the new Prophet, in apparent danger of his life,
left his home in Mecca with one companion and made his way
to an unknown future in the eleven-camel-days distant
township of Yathrib, soon to be known as Medina. One hundred
and three years later the vanguards of his empire were
crossing the Pyrenees into France, having conquered the
whole of North Africa and most of Spain, while in the East
that same empire had penetrated, through Persia and India,
as far as the borders of China; and with subsequent losses
outweighed by subsequent gains, Islam has remained in
possession of most of those territories until the present
day.
This expansion is one of, if
not the most remarkable historical phenomena of the last two
millenia. Titus Burckhardt comments on this expansion, its
lasting effects, and its connection with Qur’anic Arabic:
Without Islam, the Arab thrust of the seventh century - even
supposing it to have been possible without the religious
impulse - would have been no more than an episode in the
history of the Middle East; decadent as they may have been,
the great sedentary civilizations, would have made short
work of absorbing these hordes of Bedouin Arabs, and the
nomadic invaders of the cultivated lands would have
finished, as is generally the case, by accepting the customs
and forms of expression of the sedentaries. But it was
exactly the opposite that happened in the case of Islam, at
least in a certain regard: it was the Arabs, nomads for the
most part, who imposed on the sedentary peoples they
conquered their forms of thought and expression by imposing
their language upon them. In fact, the outstanding, and
somehow refulgent, manifestation of the Arab genius is
language, including writing. It was this language which not
only preserved the ethnic heritage of the Arabs outside
Arabia, but caused it to radiate far beyond its racial
homeland. It was by the mediation of the Arabic language
that the essential Arab genius was effectively communicated
to Muslim civilization as a whole. The extraordinary
normative power of the Arabic language derives from its role
as a sacred language as well as from its archaic nature,
both factors being, in any case, connected. It is its
archaic quality that predestined Arabic for its role as a
sacred language, and it was the Quranic revelation that, as
it were, actualized its primordial substance. Archaism, in
the linguistic order, is not, in any event, synonymous with
simplicity of structure, very much to the contrary.
Languages generally grow poorer with the passing of time by
gradually losing the richness of their vocabulary, the ease
with which they can diversify various aspects of one and the
same idea and their power of synthesis, which is the ability
to express many things with few words. In order to make up
for this impoverishment, modern languages have become more
complicated on the rhetorical level; while perhaps gaining
in surface precision, they have not done so as regards
content.
The forms of thought and
expression referred to above have, over the centuries, given
rise to and nourished one of the world’s great artistic
traditions, intimately interwoven as they are with the lives
of countless Muslims and embodying the profoundest
dimensions of Islam. Titus Burckhardt writes:
If one were to reply to the question 'what is Islam?' by
simply pointing to one of the masterpieces of Islamic art
such as, for example, the Mosque of Cordova, or that of Ibn
Tulun in Cairo, or one of the madrasahs in Samarqand or even
the Taj Mahal, that reply, summary as it is, would be
nonetheless valid, for the art of Islam expresses what its
name indicates, and it does so without ambiguity.
He elaborates further:
It is not
surprising, nor strange, that the most outward manifestation
of a religion or civilization like Islam - and art is by
definition an exteriorization - should reflect in its own
fashion what is most inward in that civilization. The
substance of art is beauty; and this, in Islamic terms, is a
divine quality and as such has a double aspect: in the
world, it is appearance; it is the garb which, as it were,
clothes beautiful beings and beautiful things; in God,
however, or in itself, it is pure inward beatitude; it is
the divine quality which, among all the divine qualities
manifested in the world, most directly recalls pure Being.
Martin Lings expands on this by referring to the teachings
of Frithjof Schuon:
In his
concise yet far-reaching definition of what may be said to
constitute a religion, Frithjof Schuon includes the presence
of sacred art as one of the criteria of authenticity. This
will not seem surprising to anyone who bears in mind that
the function of sacred art, always in the strictest sense of
the term, is parallel to that of the Revelation itself as a
means of causing repercussions in the human soul in the
direction of the Transcendent. It is seldom, however,
contemporary with the initial impact of a religion, and it
thus able to compensate for certain losses, above all as a
means of expressing to later generations something of what
the presence of the Messenger expressed to the first
generation. The Qur'an makes it clear that a Prophet must be
considered as a Divine masterpiece. In one passage, God says
to Moses what could be translated: I have fashioned thee
as a work of art for Myself (XX, 41); and in another,
Muhammad is told: Verily of an immense magnitude is thy
nature (LXVIII, 4).
The pinnacle of Islamic sacred art is Arabic calligraphy,
which transmits the verses of the Holy Qur’an in visual
form. Martin Lings quotes from Frithjof Schuon’s
‘Understanding Islam’:
The verses
of the Qur'an are not only utterances which transmit
thoughts; they are also, in a sense, beings, powers,
talismans. The soul of the Muslim is as it were woven out of
sacred formulae; in these he works, in these he rests, in
these he lives, in these he dies.
The effect on the sacred art of Islam of this immersion of
Muslim life in the verses of the Holy Qur’an is elaborated
upon by Titus Burckhardt:
The
language of the Quran is omnipresent in the World of Islam;
the entire life of a Muslim is filled with Quranic formulae,
prayers, litanies and invocations in Arabic, the elements of
which are drawn from the Sacred Book; innumerable
inscriptions bear witness to this. It could be said that
this ubiquity of the Quran works like a spiritual vibration
- there is no better term to describe an influence which is
both spiritual and sonorous - and this vibration necessarily
determines the modes and measures of Muslim art; the plastic
art of Islam is therefore, in a certain way, the reflection
of the word of the Quran.
The
importance of the Qur’an in Islam, indeed its complete
centrality, necessitated its thorough recording, and from
this the need for writing of the greatest beauty possible.
Martin Lings explains:
The need
to record and hand down to succeeding generations every
syllable of the Qur'an with exactitude made it impossible to
rely on anything so fallible as human memory even though the
memories in question were outstanding. But the point to be
made here is not that a people ungiven to writing and
building should have come to be, through the force of
circumstances, both writers and builders. The analogy we are
drawing is based on the change from almost nothing to almost
everything; and in the case of calligraphy the change is
perhaps even more striking than in that of architecture. It
might even be said not only that the Arabs have never been
surpassed as calligraphers, but also that they have only
been equalled by one other people, namely the Chinese, whose
art has, however, developed along very different lines. It
cannot, however, be considered a paradox that the
civilization of the unlettered Prophet should have been
destined to excel in the art of lettering. Even apart from
the probable advantages of starting an enterprise
uncluttered by previous experiences, the Arabs'
disinclination to write down precious words had no doubt a
very positive part to play in the genesis of Arabic
calligraphy. These people were in love with the beauty of
their language and with the beauty of the human voice. There
was absolutely no common measure between these two summits
on the one hand, and the ungainliness of the only available
script on the other. Their disdain for writing showed a
sense of values; and in the light of final results it is
legitimate to suppose that it was the reverse side of an
openness to calligraphic inspiration, as much as to say,
"Since we have no choice but to write down the Revelation,
then let that written record be as powerful an experience
for the eye as the memorized record is for the ear when the
verses are spoken or chanted."
Titus Burckhardt’s comments on the visual connections of
Arabic calligraphy to the language it records are also
highly pertinent here:
The art of
Arabic writing is by definition the most Arab of all the
plastic arts of Islam. It belongs nevertheless to the entire
Islamic world, and is even considered to be the most noble
of the arts, because it gives visible form to the revealed
word of the Quran. Princes and princesses practised copying
out the Sacred Book in beautiful script. Calligraphy is also
the art most widely shared by all Muslims, since anyone who
can write is in a position to appreciate the merits of a
good calligrapher, and it can be said without fear of
exaggeration that nothing has typified the aesthetic sense
of the Muslim peoples as much as the Arabic script. One
needs to be familiar with its forms and styles in order to
follow the full sweep of the art, particularly in
architectural ornamentation which is frequently dominated by
epigraphy. We can give the measure of Arabic calligraphy,
which is so astonishingly rich in style and modes, if we say
that it knows how to combine the greatest geometrical
strictness with the most melodious rhythm. And in saying
this we also define the two poles between which this art
evolves and which it succeeds in reconciling in various ways
and various styles, each of which represents a perfect
graphic balance and each of which is consistently valid. For
one of the typical characteristics of Arabic calligraphy is
that none of its various styles, born at different periods,
has even fallen into disuse; calligraphy turns to each of
them, depending on the nature and context of texts, and does
not hesitate, should the occasion arise, to place
inscriptions in contrasting styles side by side.
Turning now to the art of Qur’an illumination, Martin Lings
writes:
The art of Qur'an
illumination was bound to develop more slowly than that of
calligraphy because it was not directly called for by the
text. It was furthermore held in check by the fear of
allowing anything to intrude upon that text. More
positively, we can be certain that it was this same
reverential awe, haybah, which guaranteed exactly the right
channels for the flow of this development towards a result
which is, by general agreement, marvellously right. "Fear of
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." This saying of
Solomon, continually quoted in Islam, is itself a synthesis
of wisdom which has its application at all levels. Sacred
Art is "wise"; and from what has already been said about its
anonymity, it follows that the Quranic art of calligraphy
itself, let alone that of illumination, was bound to start
on a note of "reserve", a pious courtesy related to awe and
to the artist's consciousness of the Divine Majesty.
In Qur’an illumination, the abstract designs of Islamic art
attained an especially high degree of beauty when the artist
applied them to the sacred text. Martin Lings further
clarifies the context and function of these designs in
Qur’an manuscripts:
The Qur'an
itself may be said to hold out certain opportunities, as it
were, in invitation to the illuminator. The most obvious of
these are the surah headings, and the divisions between the
verses. In addition, indications that five or ten verses
have passed give an opportunity for a regularly repeated
ornament in the margin, and the reader will find it helpful
to know at what points in the text he is required to make a
prostration, which also can be indicated ornamentally. It
is, moreover, in the nature of things that if the opening of
a surah admits of illumination, the opening of the first
surah and therefore of the whole book should be treated with
a particularly striking display of art.
And, in commenting on the esoteric function of Qur’an
illumination, he reminds us:
It
must also be remembered that the whole purpose of
illumination is to recall the higher or deeper dimension of
the text. The relationship between the hidden book and the
fully revealed Qur'an is one of majesty to beauty of
contraction, or reserve, to expansion; and however
paradoxical it may seem, illumination, being there to remind
us of the hidden book, has an overall function of majesty in
relation to the beauty of the text.
The abstract designs of Islamic art are sometimes referred
to as arabesques. Titus Burckhardt clarifies the forms these
designs take:
In the broad sense
of the term, the arabesque includes ornamentation in
stylized plant forms and strictly geometrical interlacing
work. The first kind of ornamentation is all rhythm, or, to
put it more exactly, it is a practically perfect visual
transcription of rhythm, whereas the second is crystalline
in nature. Again then, in this domain, we discover the two
poles of all artistic expression in Islam: the sense of
rhythm and the spirit of geometry.
Further commenting on the stylised plant forms, he states:
In its more stylized versions, an arabesque in plant forms
bears no more than a distant likeness to a plant. But it
does represent a perfect transcription of the laws of rhythm
into visual terms. Its unfolding is continuous, like a wave,
with contrasting phases having various degrees of resonance.
The design does not need to be symmetrical, but, to make up
for this, it always has certain repetitions, whose rhythmic
character is accentuated by the fact that the sounds and the
silences are aesthetically equivalent. Strictly speaking,
rhythm belongs not to space but to time, of which it is not
the quantitative measure but the qualitative one. It is by
the mediation of movement that rhythm is re-established in
the spatial dimension.
Martin
Lings gives an example of the specific use of these plant
form designs in Qur’an illumination:
A Qur'an recitation must not be thought of as limited to
this world for it has repercussions up to the Heavens, where
its "fruits" await the believer. Otherwise expressed, the
Qur'an uses the symbol of the tree so that it may liberate
itself from being subject, in the awareness or in the
subconsciousness of the believer, to the illusion that it is
just one book among other books. It may thus be said to
point a way for the illuminator, telling him how to set free
from the finite its Infinite Presence. We need not therefore
be surprised that one of the most fundamental ornaments of
Qur'an illumination should be arboreal, namely the palmette,
shujayrah or "little tree", nor need we doubt that it is
meant to stand for the good word.
Returning to the geometric designs, Titus Burckhardt writes:
For a Muslim artist or - what comes to the same thing - a
craftsman who has to decorate a surface, geometrical
interlacement doubtless represents the most intellectually
satisfying form, for it is an extremely direct expression of
the idea of the Divine Unity underlying the inexhaustible
variety of the world. True, Divine Unity as such is beyond
all representation, because its nature, which is total, lets
nothing remain outside itself; it is 'without a second'.
Never the less, it is through harmony that it is reflected
in the world, harmony being nothing other than 'unity in
multiplicity' (al-wahdah fi ‘l-kathrah), the same as
'multiplicity in unity' (al-kathrah fi ‘l-wahdah).
Interlacement expresses the one aspect and the other.
