The History and the Spread of Calligraphic Styles - Assignment Example

Student’s Name: Student’s Id: Title: Date of submission: The study of Muslim calligraphy is affected by the geographical boundaries and time. This means that art varies with place of existence. The Islamic art has been divided into seven art zones whose boundary is not clearly demarcated but are known to have originated from different time zones between 7th and the present day. These areas show the artistic nature of the Islamic aesthetic creations and serves to show how art has established unity among its groups although internal variations can also be accounted for. The historical map of the diffusion of the Muslim art shows that the Arabian gulf together with part of West Africa are the centers of divergence. The art which diffused in this case including musical instruments, vocal styles and codes, architectural forms and decorations and visual motifs and structures. In the history of calligraphy, the chapter enumerates the most valuable calligraphers from Zayd Ibn Thabit, the secretary of Mohamad to Darwish Abd al Majid Taliqani, the most important master of the shikastah script. Of all the categories of the Islamic art, calligraphy is the most prevalent, most significant and most revered by Muslims worldwide. History has it that the writing was learned by close associates of Muhammad who wanted to substitute memorizing and the necessity grew when Muhammad died. Writings evolved from writing on the reeds, inscriptions on stones, use of Arabic numerals to which were closely associated with Jewish ones and finally, the Arabic system was refined. It is after this refinement that the calligraphy came in as the Muslim community wanted to beautify their writings. Here, calligraphers produced variants of the basic Kufi fonts which were elongated. The variation led to was in the form of angular forms of kufi. Others come as floriated kufi where the verticals of letters are extended to form leafy structures, plaited kufi forming decorative laces on the vertical and the animated kufi for letters ending in stylish animal or human fingers. By the 9th century, almost 20 cursive scripts had been developed and was standardized in terms of vertical and horizontal length by Vizier Ibn Muglah of 10th century who proliferated the variants of the cursive texts using the rhombic dots. From the 11th century, more cursive and rounded script known as Naskhi and is distinguished by its clarity, simplicity and legibility thought to have been introduced by Ibn Muglah for the court of Baghdad. Ibn al Bawwab is accredited for pioneering the use of rounded scripts for the Quran. The rounded scripts were further perfected by Abd allah al Mustad who is believed to create the six cursive scripts of his time. From then, the following generations have been following generations have been making a great use of variance of size for beautification. Every ruler, dynasty and era has strived to produce a more beautiful Quran than its predecessors. Calligraphers become a prized edition to any court and hence, every learned person strived to master the art. Calligraphy came not only to be used in iron-working, glassware and wood. Thuluth is one of the most important cursive script to be developed in the Muslim world and is usually used for architecture, small object decorations and in writing tittles for the Quran. Maghribi has been taken to be an interplay between the Naskhi and Kufi, characterized by exaggerated loop extensions below the final lines of certain words. One of the four substyles of the system is the Qayrawani distinguishable by very short verticals. Qurtubi has finer lines and is more compact used mostly in Muslim spain. Sudanni has been used by the central Africans and it has retained its style ever since. The amalgamation of Andulasi and Maghribi gave rise to what came to be known as Maghribi and had thicker and denser textures. The three other scripts developed then are associated with Iranian innovators and include Shikastah, Ta ‘liq and Nata ‘liq. Ta’liq is associated with the slanting formats with the other two being the variants of Ta ‘liq. Nasta ‘liq is more elegant and is distinguished by the extravagantly elongated and flowing horizontal curves and the subsequent filling in of small circles. It replaced Naskhi practically for writing of the Persian works and has also been widely used for secular work such as writing albums. The script has never been used for Quranic purposes and has only been used for epitaphs and inscriptions on monuments in areas where the Persian and the Iranian influence was felt. The shikastah script is a difficult version of the Ta ‘liq made up of tiny letters with very long verticals it was primarily used for business communication. The Diwani script is another Muslim script associated with Ta ‘liq though its relations to the first Persian script is unclear and was mostly used by the ottoman. It hasn’t been used for Quranic writings and is only characterized by elevated and flowing style. The contemporary calligraphy in the current Muslim world has been associated with the adaptation of the non-Muslim cultures by the calligraphers rather than the regional boundaries. The art has not died with age considering that there is a renewed spirit to try different new arts in arts. Variety is still existent in the current world too. The traditional calligraphy in the contemporary society conforms to the earlier versions of calligraphy in terms of traditions and mainstreams the main elements of the Muslim calligraphic traditions of Muslims. Such type of calligraphy survived mainly because of apprenticeship in the Muslim schools which were called kuttab but these schools declined and are in the verge of extinction. Even though most of the Muslim are now adhering to the western cultures, traditional calligraphy still survives considering that its aesthetic and originality is desired by the Muslim community. The calligraphers of this century remain true to the demand of abstract quality by use of abstract materials unique in the sense that they recognize the beauty in the arrangement and patterns of the word rather than the figures. With this, flower motifs, leaf figures and geometric shapes are used are abstract. Figural calligraphy is another type of contemporary calligraphy which combines figural motifs with the calligraphic elements in a different way. The figural elements are restricted to flowers and leaves which are better naturalized to suit the Islamic art. Human figures were not included in the Quranic and Mosque prints but on the vessels used domestically. This combination includes bringing together the future and the past on something which could be modelled which means and using small, compressed and elongated letters to fit the profile of the mold. Some try to mold letters to achieve a figural depictions. Some could also use the design of integration whereby letters themselves are extended to plants animal motifs as a solid part of the design. The calligraphy cannot be separated from other elements of design. Expressionist is the third type of the contemporary calligraphic styles of the Muslim world which is closely tied to the western culture. Its existence can be associated to the existence of the accumulation of the Muslim art together with the western art. Artists in this case tend to use the vocabulary of the Islamic culture but the vocabulary is used out of the context of the Muslim calligraphic setting. In this case, violent distortions are evident in order to depict the emotions attached to certain objects or people. This slightly goes away from the Muslim type which draws away the creature and makes one go towards transcendence. On the other hand, the expressionist type emphasizes individualistic concerns, subjective feelings, mood and human emotional depiction. This piece of art is considered alien to the Islamic culture despite the fact that it borrows the motifs of the Muslim heritage and the Arabic letters, it offers little artistic revival to the Muslim culture. Judging them as Islamic is just like dressing the western Christian with a turban and assuming that he is a Christian. Symbolic calligraphy is the contemporary calligraphy which uses symbols to convey meaning to and as it could be seen, the western culture has intruded the artistic nature of the Islamic religion in this case. This symbolism has been depicted historically in the vertical Arabic letters of the Shaadah which are taken to mean the confession. Every letter in this case can be symbolic to some idea and the entire epigraph is also regarded to be symbolic. It is worth noting that the numerous examples in pictorial format presented in this chapter prove to be very instrumental in painting the real picture of the history and the spread of certain types of the calligraphic styles across the world. Some examples date back to the 7th century which proves very educative too and interesting to assess. Read More

 

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