Calligraphy

From the Greek word for "beautiful writing," calligraphy was considered the highest art form in Islam, for several reasons. For one, Muslims believe that Allah used the Arabic language to recite the Qur'an to Muhammad, and for that reason, it has a spiritual meaning for Muslims. Also, using words as artistry avoided the problem of using pictorial images. Whereas decorative writing all but disappeared in Europe with the advent of the printing press, the Islamic world retained it as an art form long after the necessity of writing longhand was removed by modern technology. Calligraphy adorned architecture, decorative arts, coins, jewellery, textiles, weapons, tools, paintings, and manuscripts.

Although the Arabic language and script existed before Islam, the spread of the religion also facilitated the spread of the language throughout the new Muslim lands. Arabic became a basic component of Islamic culture, mostly because it was the language of the Qur'an. Caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705) decreed that Arabic should be the administrative language of the empire. There were many Muslim regions, of course, in which Arabic was not the native language. Persian was the major non-Arabic language spoken in the Islamic world, and in the 7th century it had its own script. As Islam spread through the areas where Persian and other languages were spoken, however, the Arabic script was adopted. The Persian language, also known as Farsi, added four letters to the Arabic script to represent sounds that existed in Persian, but not in Arabic. The Turks later also added another letter to render a distinctly Turkish sound, although modern Turkish no longer uses the Arabic script. The Arabic script is still used to write the Kazakh, Uzbek, and Tajik languages in Central Asia, as well as Urdu in present-day Pakistan. It was also used at one point, though no longer, to write Malay, Swahili, and several North African languages. Arabic, belonging to the Semitic language group, has 28 letters. There are only 17 different forms, however, so dots or strokes above or below the forms are used to indicate different letters. For calligraphic purposes, these extra markings add to the beauty and artistic appeal of Arabic.

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