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The Islamic Manuscript Tradition

Ten Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections

Indiana University Press

Introduction: Islamic Book Arts in Indiana University Collections

CHRISTIANE GRUBER

In his treatise on scribal practices, tools, and technology, the Zirid ruler al-Mu 'izz b. Badis (d. 1062) is keen to establish that Islamic traditions linked to the pen have stimulated a written heritage that is prolific and enduring. With the aid of graphic tools and their supple supports, calligraphers and painters have contributed to the vast and rich corpus of book arts that have flourished in Islamic lands from as early as the seventh century until the present day. While practitioners in the "art of the word" attempted to present knowledge through writing, artists, preferring the "art of the form," strove to depict the world around them by means of the picture.

Although calligraphy and painting often are considered two discrete methods of communication, they frequently are combined in creative syntheses. In Persian and Turkish spheres in particular, practices of graphic and pictorial representation are linked through the metaphoric potential of their shared tool, the pen or qalam (Figure 1.1). From the very beginnings of Islam, the pen has been heralded as the primordial tool used by God to reveal sacred scripture and to record man's actions in his book of deeds. The pen's prime status — as engendering all of creation and transmitting divine knowledge to humankind — is in part due to its intimate association to God, who is described in the Qur'an as "He Who teaches by the pen."

Anything which the pens have given fruit the ages have not dared to erase.

al-Mu 'izz b. Badis

Calligraphers lauded the pen for its ability to produce form, thereby connecting the practice of writing with God's creative force (Figure 1.2). This symbolic analogy between calligraphic forms produced by the writer's qalam and God's tracing of life forms with his own "pen of creation" without a doubt elevated the calligrapher's status and legitimized his chosen profession. By extension, God could be understood as the most majestic of calligraphers, giving beautiful form to primal substance and therefore active in moderating the diffusion of knowledge. This recurring emphasis on the primacy of the word, along with the consequent practice of writing, reveals Islam as a semantic and logocentric culture par excellence.

Unlike calligraphers, artists were cautious in drawing parallels between their creation of form and God's fashioning of the universe. This prudence appears to have been due to their fear of being accused of usurping God's exclusive ability to create life. Although warnings against painters are not included in the Qur'an, they do appear in collections of hadiths (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad). In one instance, the Prophet is recorded as refusing to enter his house when he notices that his wife 'A'isha has bought a cushion with images, proclaiming: "The painters of these pictures will be punished on the Day of Resurrection. It will be said to them, 'Put life in what you have created.' The angels do not enter a house where there are pictures." To a large extent, such statements help to explain both a perceived lack of pictures and/or the general adversity to images in Islamic cultures.

Despite such admonitions in hadith collections, Islamic artistic traditions nevertheless are far from being aniconic or iconoclastic, thus revealing the multiple disjunctures between religious prohibition and pictorial production. In what may seem at first glance a paradoxical predicament, paintings thrived in a variety of Islamic cultures. For example, in Arab lands, frescoes adorn the walls of palaces and baths, and pictures are included in illustrated books such as scientific treatises and belletristic works produced especially from ca. 700 to 1300. In Persian spheres, figural imagery complemented historical, biographic, and poetic texts produced from about 1300 to 1900, while in Mughal India, portraiture (Figure 1.3) and allegorical representation formed two powerful modes of royal representation especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During these two centuries, Ottoman Turkish visual traditions flourished as well, having embraced the pictorial mode as a means to illustrate epic, romantic, and biographical tales or to convey scientific and military knowledge. In many instances, paintings functioned as illustrations of written narratives and thus provided descriptive or interpretative augmentations to a reading experience, while simultaneously adding an aesthetic dimension to the production of Islam's written heritage.

From the sixteenth century forward, Persian painters in particular were keen to align their occupation with that of calligraphers, since both fields required mastery of linearity, contour, balance, and rhythm of form. A number of authors wrote treatises on the subject during the Safavid period (1501–1722), postulating that painting and calligraphy emerged from the same impetus to fashion form through the pen. Safavid authors identify two kinds of qalams: either a reed pen and thus vegetal (nabati) in nature, or a painting brush and thus animal (hayvani) in nature. This theory of the "two pens" in effect was employed in an attempt to elevate painting to the rank of calligraphy by stressing both practices' basic use of modules and their ability to divulge information. Because of its technical similarities to the art of calligraphy, painting too could be justified as an exalted pursuit and a praiseworthy vocation, as the eminent sixteenth-century Safavid calligrapher and author Dust Muhammad notes: "Painting is not without justification (niz bi asli), and the painter's conscience need not be pricked by the thorn of despair."

Despite various injunctions against images and image-makers in the hadith, painting nevertheless prospered alongside calligraphy to create a binary system of visual and textual communication in Arab, Turkish, and especially Persian lands. Both practices were bound together by the qalam, itself perceived as an authoritative and consecrated instrument of primordial origins. Practitioners of the calligraphic and pictorial arts also were united through their shared dedication to experimenting with form and developing new technologies to transmit knowledge in its various iterations.

Following suit, a discussion of the frequent connections between calligraphy and painting, and their shared tools and materials, is offered here, via the exploration of Islamic book arts held in the Lilly Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts, the Indiana University Art Museum, and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, Bloomington. Materials include writing implements and decorated papers, Persian and Ottoman Turkish illustrated manuscripts, miniature books from various geographical spheres, printed books from Ottoman Turkey, modern calligraphic specimens, and Persian erotica. These many works underscore the variety of book arts in Islamic traditions from the ninth century to the present while testifying to the richness of Indiana University's collections.

FROM SCRIPT TO CALLIGRAPHY

Arabic belongs to the group of Semitic languages that includes Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac. Although whether the Arabic alphabet developed from Nabataean characters or from Syriac script remains unclear, Arabic displays the same morphological and phonetic characteristics of other Semitic languages, most prominently a trilateral root system, guttural and fricative sounds, and the precedence given to consonants over vowels. Furthermore, as in the written form of other Semitic languages, words in Arabic are constructed through the creation of ligatures between letters of the alphabet, and words are transcribed from the right to the left margin of a page.

Arabic script was already in use ca. 300–600. Lapidary inscriptions dating from these early centuries in north and south Arabia record personal dedications and religious feelings or issue laws and other public decrees. These graffiti reveal that Arabic in its written form did not follow exact orthographic criteria, and it was not until the seventh century that Arabic script became more or less codified. With the need to record the oral revelations of God to Muhammad through the Qur'an — as well as to solidify the newly emergent politico-religious Muslim community through record keeping, official decrees, and the transmission of knowledge — Arabic became an autonomous idiom and its script consequently underwent a process of standardization. The rise of Arabic and its writing system thus was simultaneous with the emergence of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula.

Parts of the Qur'an initially were inscribed on ephemeral materials such as bones, palm leaves, and stones as a means of recording the Prophet Muhammad's oral recitations. To avoid divergences in — and to ensure the permanence of — Qur'anic revelation, Muhammad's recitations were collected and codified under the first two rightly guided caliphs (al-rashidun), Abu Bakr (d. 634) and 'Uthman (d. 656). From this time forward, the Qur'an was carefully recorded on more long-lasting and flexible materials, first on parchment (dehaired and cured animal skin) and later on paper (macerated flax or hemp fibers). Along with the technology of the supple, foldable support — whether it be parchment or paper — emerged the book or codex (mushaf), a concrete form at the very heart of scriptural production, scholarly and administrative practices, and artistic endeavors in the Islamic world.

The earliest Islamic books that survive comprise a series of approximately forty thousand parchment fragments, yielding approximately one thousand Qur'anic manuscripts, found by a team of German scholars in 1979 under the roof of the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen. These parchment folios date from the seventh to the tenth century, and vary in size, from minute pocket editions to monumental volumes. Leaves are in the oblong format and contain Qur'anic verses written in black or brown ink in a square, angular script commonly referred to as Kufic. Vowel marks usually are indicated by dots in red, gold, or green ink, and markers separating verses (ayas) often take the shape of floral rosettes.

Many parchment fragments of Kufic Qur'ans are scattered in international collections, and Indiana University holds a single folio with verses 26–28 of chapter 41, entitled "The Adoration" (al-Fussilat), on its recto and verso (Figures 1.4 and 1.5), as well as a fourteen-folio section containing, for example, the chapter heading of chapter 70, entitled "The Stairways" (al-Ma 'arij), written in gold ink and provided with a decorative finial in the left margin (Figure 1.6). These Qur'anic fragments display a sharp Kufic script, penned either in black or dark brown ink, at five to seven lines per folio. Words expand or contract to fit the exact length of each line. Red dots on the fourteen-folio fragment appear both above and below the text line; these serve as diacritics to mark the normal vocalization of the text. On the other hand, the single-folio fragment displays gold dots on both the recto (hair side) and the verso (flesh side). These gold dots give more precise directions on reciting the text by bringing the reader's attention to each unvocalized consonant (sukun), the duplication of a consonant (tashdid), and the accusative nunnation (tanwin).

The fourteen-folio fragment (Figure 1.6) also bears a large gold fifty-verse marker on its third line of text, as well as a beautiful chapter (sura) heading for chapter 70, typically entitled "The Stairways" (al-Ma 'arij), but here given a title according to the first two words of the chapter — "So asked the questioner" — followed by the total number of its verses. The gold ink and the marginal finial mark the chapter heading apart and serve to visually demarcate the text's break for the reader. Furthermore, the variant chapter title is intriguing but not truly remarkable, since in the early period one sees suras sometimes entitled by the first word or series of words contained in the first verse rather than a peculiar term or animal (such as cow, spider, or ant) that is mentioned in the subsequent narrative. This chapter title does not truly present an aberration of the Qur'anic text per se.

Indiana University's Kufic Qur'an falls into "Group One" of Kufic Qur'ans as devised by the scholar Estelle Whelan: this group comprises Qur'ans executed in a horizontal format, containing thirty sections (ajza'), liturgical breaks, and sura titles with numerals in an archaic, and thus possibly ritualistic, form. Such examples differ from other Qur'ans identified as "Group Two" and produced in vertical format, which do not contain ajza' or sura titles and therefore do not seem to have fulfilled liturgical functions. Although Whelan argues that Kufic Qur'ans belonging to "Group One" may have been produced in the Hijaz area or in Iraq, at present there is no firm method of establishing an exact provenance for these kinds of portable and peripatetic materials. Despite these limitations, it is possible to suggest, based on paleographic style, ornamental details, and the gold-painted sura heading, that the fourteen-folio Kufic Qur'an was made in the ninth or tenth century, possibly for liturgical purposes rather than for private use.

Kufic script (and its variants) evolved from lapidary inscriptions and rightly can be said to be a "natural product of the chisel." Although this angular script's use in Qur'ans survived for a number of centuries, the style eventually gave way to more fluid cursive scripts, which initially evolved out of the impetus to make written communication in administrative circles more swift and efficient. From the tenth century onward, new proportioned cursive scripts were formulated by the calligrapher Ibn Muqla (d. 939) and later developed by his equally famous successors Ibn al-Bawwab (d. 1022) and Yaqut al-Musta'simi (d. 1298). Together, these three leaders and their pupils created the calligraphic school known as the "six pens" (al-aqlam alsitta), which include the six scripts naskh, thuluth, muhaqqaq, rayhani, tawqi?, and riqa?. At the same time as these six "pens" or scripts matured, Arabic as a written system was perfected through the formulation and systematic use of diacritics. From the tenth to the thirteenth century, therefore, cursive lettering started to replace the rigidity of Kufic; the Arabic writing system became fully codified and thus wholly legible; and paper surpassed parchment as the medium of choice.

Through these new cursive scripts, artists explored the aesthetic dimensions of calligraphy, thereby transforming scribal practices into an active pursuit of "beautiful writing" (husn al-khatt). Artistic writing surpassed the simple necessity of transcription, and as a result calligraphy emerged superior to scribalism. Expressive but controlled and pleasant to the eye, Islamic calligraphy presents an artistic system of written forms that practitioners elevated beyond simple vocation. As the calligrapher Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi (d. after 1009–1010) remarks, "Handwriting is a difficult geometry and an exacting craft. [It] is the jewelry fashioned by the hand from the pure gold of the intellect." Through these many practices and surviving testimonies, it is clear that calligraphers understood their practice of "beautiful writing" as an intellectually rigorous enterprise.

Ibn Muqla was the first to expound a standardized system of proportional writing (al-khatt al-mansub), in which he described the relative size of each letter. Each letter's size was based on the dimensions of the alif, the first letter of the alphabet, itself shaped like a vertical line. The height of the alif was determined by a (variable) number of diamond-shaped rhombic points, created by slightly pressing down the reed pen's diagonally slit nib. Ibn al-Bawwab furthered Ibn Muqla's rhombic system by inscribing the alif into a circle; the alif served as a yardstick with which to determine the height of subsequent letters, and the circle's radius provided their relative length. This proportional system, based on the rhomboid-based alif module, has been used, altered, and perfected by practitioners of cursive scripts from the tenth century until today.

Calligraphers practiced proportioned scripts based on the rhombic system in their practice sheets (Arabic mashq, or Turkish mesk), which they used to teach the art of "beautiful writing" to their pupils and to practice their craft prior to carrying out a final product. For example, the Turkish calligrapher 'Aziz Efendi (d. 1934) created a cursive mesk in black ink, which he signed and dated 1348/1929 (Figure 1.7). This calligraphic piece, which includes prayers to God and other laudatory expressions in Arabic, is carefully marked by a series of rhomboids showing the relative height and width of each letter. Although the exercise appears mathematical in its approach, it is not impossible that the rhomboids were added later and thus inserted a posteriori to give the calligraphy its presumed structure, rather than vice versa. Regardless of the actual function of the rhomboids, this specimen may have been used as a sample to teach a pupil the rules of calligraphic practice, or it may have been commissioned as an "exhibition piece" for a patron interested in the calligraphic process.

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Excerpted from The Islamic Manuscript Tradition by Christiane Gruber. Copyright © 2010 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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