al Qalam, the Pen

B'ism illah ar-rahman ar-rahim
"In the name of God, most merciful and beneficent"

The image above is not from Beirut, but from the Louvre's new Islamic Collection display. The original was a black and white projection I photographed, then did some digital transformations on. The colors I chose were meant to represent a generically Islamic context; they are not meant to indicate an affinity for any group or philosophical approach.

One of the things that attracted me to the Mideast 4 decades ago was the art of Islamic calligraphy. At the time I was teaching myself western calligraphy. When I encountered things like the picture above I felt I was in the presence of as distilled and perfected a version of the art form as one could ever hope to find.

Because of the general (though by no means universal) limitation on the portrayal of human beings in the Islamic world, as well as because of the primacy given to the written Quran as the word of God, calligraphy flourished for centuries as an acceptable and deeply meaningful form of artistic expression.

Soon after I arrived in Lebanon I was fortunate to encounter a person who became one of my closest friends: Muhammad Hamade. Muhammad, now deceased, was, already in his youth, a calligrapher of astonishing fluidity, well-versed in a wide variety of semitic scripts and alphabets, and a poet in his own right.

Our shared interest led to uncounted hours of discussion about the art of Arabic calligraphy, and its history and antecedents. Through many long sessions in which we often forgot to eat until midnight my appreciation of this art form and its practitioners only deepened.

I was also fortunate to encounter Dr. Sami Makarem - also now deceased - whose father had been a calligrapher in the most ancient tradition. He was a practitioner of the art of 'miniature' calligraphy, inscribing Quranic phrases on grains of rice, for example. Dr. Sami once told me a wonderful story about his father. An awestruck observer of one of his grain-of-rice inscriptions once asked him if he used a loupe while working. The sheikh shook his head and said: 'Why would I use such a thing? If my heart cannot tell my hands how to move, how can my eyes help them?'

Some notes on usage, transliteration and so on. When I started this blog I decided, rather instinctively, to italicize Arabic words and phrases in the text. This seemed cleaner than quotes, although obviously non-standard. It sets the Arabic off from the English in a clear and visible way, without introducing confusion about whether I am quoting someone or not. Another detail: Arabic words can be transliterated into English in any number of ways: a problem that has bedeviled scholars and journalists for hundreds of years. Take the most common name in the Arab world, for example: محمد. All we've got here are four consonants: M H M D. Should this be spelled 'Muhammed', 'Mohammed', 'Muhammad', or 'Mohammad'. In fact, as commonly written it's not even clear that the second 'm' needs to be doubled.

There are two problems in transliteration: Arabic is a consonantal language where vowels aren't regularly written, and it includes letter sounds we don't have (the opposite is also true, though not as frequent). Therefore, no perfect transliteration into common English is even possible without adding fanciful letters to represent the sounds we don't have. For this purpose digits and other signs are usually called into play. So, for example, the village where I used to live - بعقلين  - becomes 'B?qleen' or maybe 'B?qline'. This is a system that has come into wide use with the advent of texting in the Mideast, and which has been reasonably standardized. The problem is that English readers won't have a clue what those additional letters are supposed to represent. The place I used to live actually sounds like: 'Baaqline'. Accordingly, I've opted to simply reproduce Arabic words more or less how they sound, using our common letters. My one exception is the use of the apostrophe to indicate a glottal stop or the letter 'ain' (or 'ayn'), which is similar. This is a time-honored usage and doesn't make a word look incomprehensible. In this transcription, the village I used to live in becomes: Ba'aqline, and the apostrophe indicates that the two 'a's are actually an 'ain', and you need to constrict your throat when saying them.

If the same word is spelled differently twice in my text it's because either way feels equally right, or wrong.