2000); Hugh Kennedy, The Armies of the Caliphs: Mili-
tary Society in the Early Islamic State (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2001); Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire,
1700–1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2000); David Wasserstein, The Caliphate in the West:
An Islamic Institution in the Iberian Peninsula (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993).
calligraphy
The term calligraphy comes from Greek kalli-
graphia, meaning beautiful writing, or the visual
elaboration of written scripts known in Arabic as
khatt (line).
Within the field of Islamic art, calligraphy
refers to stylized scripts in languages that use (or
used) the Arabic alphabet, among them Arabic,
Persian, Urdu, and Ottoman Turkish. The word
that designates the practice and the forms of styl-
ized writing is khatt, whose basic meaning as line
associates it with both architectural planning and
geometry. As calligraphy, khatt means penman-
ship or an individual hand, and khattat applies to
a master practitioner of khatt as a visual art form
(but also to sign painters).
The status of Arabic as the shared language
of Islamic scriptures led Orientalist historians to
associate stylized scripts exclusively with reli-
gious values and, at the same time, to consider
this writing a subset of (meaningless) arabesqUe
ornamentation. The practice of stylized writing,
in fact, has a number of internal histories that
governed forms, aesthetic criteria, and contextual
meanings. These histories show that changes in
the forms of letters indicate historical disruptions
rather than continuities; the adoption or rejection
of particular scripts was a conscious means of
expressing desired meanings through form.
The rationalization of scripts in 10th- and
11th-century iraq produced a new canon of
writing in which clarity, legibility, and harmony
defined aesthetic quality in khatt. But this writ-
ing reform also allowed its Abbasid sponsors to
order and control the output of scribes and to
create a visual system that immediately expressed
loyalty to them as opposed to rivals such as the
Fatimids, who continued the use of angular
forms. This example demonstrates that the much
romanticized art of Islamic calligraphy neither
follows an evolutionary line in which angular
letters naturally mutated into rounded ones, nor
reflects identical and unchanging Islamic ideals,
but rather highlights distinctions among them.
Qazi Ahmad’s 17th-century Persian treatise on
calligraphy similarly illustrates views governed
by a different time, place, and group ideology
and ascribes the invention of beautiful writing to
Imam Ali (d. 661), patron saint of Iranian callig-
raphers of the time.
Finally, the United States postal stamp
designed by khattat Muhammad Zakariya (whose
training comprises a spiritual content) illustrates
the use of calligraphy to symbolize the presence
of Muslims in the country. In this instance, an
official document again embraces khatt as a sign
of a particular community but deploys it as an
item of identity politics in a new cultural and
historical setting that reinterprets it to fit this
context.
See also arabic langUage and literatUre;
Fatimid dynasty; ibn al-baWWab, abU al-hasan
ali ibn hilal; ibn mUqla, abU ali mUhammad.
Nuha N. N. KhouryFurther reading: Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Orna-
ment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992);
Qazi Ahmad bin Mir Munshi al-Husayni, Gulistan-i
Hunar, trans. V. Minorsky, Calligraphers and Painters:
A Treatise by Qadi Ahmad, Son of Mir Munshi (circa
A.H. 1015/A.D. 1606) (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution, 1959); Yasin Safadi, Islamic Calligraphy
(Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala Publications, 1978); Yasser
Tabbaa, The Transformation of Islamic Art During The
Sunni Revival (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2001).call to prayer See adhan.
call to prayer 127 J