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You are here: Home / Journal of Qur'anic Studies / List of Issues / Volume 21, Issue 2 / Ahmed Moustafa and St…

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Ahmed Moustafa and Stefan Sperl, The Cosmic Script: Sacred Geometry and the
Science of Arabic Penmanship. Vol. 1: Sources and Principles of the Geometry of
Letters; Vol. 2: From Geometric Pattern to Living Form -Show less
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Arabic calligraphy is, more than the Arabic script, the topic of the two impressive volumes produced by Ahmed Moustafa and Stefan Sperl. In spite of the oblong
format that conjures the image of earlier Arabic scripts, the study is focused on the ‘classical’ scripts and more precisely on Ibn Muqla's contribution to penmanship.
Some efforts had already been devoted to this topic, notably by Nabia Abbott and Ahmad Mayer Rayef, but Moustafa and Sperl have gone further in their search
for the rules of the ‘proportioned script’ (al-khaṭṭ al-mansūb) attributed to Ibn Muqla. Their book is based on the conviction that a text, in this case a treatise
attributed to Ibn Muqla, can actually help solving this problem.

Moustafa and Sperl intend ‘to demonstrate … that the treatise attributed to [Ibn Muqla], when read in conjunction with later sources on the geometry of letters,
does contain the key to a sophisticated system of proportion’ (p. 101). The method is clear: the understanding of the treatise will depend in good part on the use of
later texts and sources, a method exemplified by Nabia Abbot in her Rise of the North Arabic Script and its Ḳur’ānic Development (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1939). Actually, this approach emerged as early as the end of the eighteenth century, when scholars started to look for a method that would enable them to
develop an Arabic palaeography: it was then thought that the information found in texts on script and calligraphy written in Arabic, Persian, or Ottoman Turkish
could provide the scientific basis for such a science. The problem is that it presupposes that various authors, active in different periods and places, shared a
common vision and used the same words with the same sense, thus legitimising this kind of cross-reading.

In the case of the present book, Moustafa and Sperl assume that penmanship followed the same rules in the fourth/tenth and the ninth/fifteenth centuries over a
large expanse of land, although there is some evidence to the contrary. One cannot fail to observe for instance that there is no agreement between Mamlūk
authors on calligraphy of the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries on a basic point, the number of calligraphic styles: to take only a few names, al-
Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333) provides us with five names, al-Kātib al-Dimashqī (d. c. 781/1379) enumerates seven scripts and al-Āthārī (d. 828/1425, see p. 173 for
instance) distinguishes seven uṣūl and seven furūʿ. Al-Qalqashandī is himself very confused on that topic. If such a basic tenet of the theory is problematic in a
specific place and over a comparatively short period of time, what can be expected about the principles relied upon by theoreticians and calligraphers who lived in
very different regions of the Islamic world and in different periods? In the case of the dimensions of the alif expressed in dots (p. 184), Moustafa and Sperl face
precisely this kind of situation when it turns out that the various authors they have selected give numbers ranging from five to eleven dots. They decide in the end
in favour of a seven dots alif. This is not a trivial point since this dimension is to play a crucial role in their reconstruction of the ‘proportioned script’.

The treatise attributed to Ibn Muqla is open to various questions. The text is known by late copies, which of course does not mean that it is contemporaneous with
the earliest of them, but casts some doubt on the date of its composition. The authorship is open to debate as there is no comparative material to ascertain that it
was written by Ibn Muqla. In addition, various arguments have recently been offered by Alain George to question the link between Ibn Muqla or his brother with
any new script and there is also some disagreement about the kind of script associated with Ibn Muqla. At the beginning of their book, Moustafa and Sperl
acknowledge the questions about the authorship (see for instance p. 4), but tend to forget this issue and consider that Ibn Muqla is actually the author of the text:
‘While his treatise does not state a figure for the length of the alif, he (=Ibn Muqla) has dropped a couple of hints’ (p. 185).

The first volume is in part a historical presentation of the history of the Arabic script. The authors have spent considerable efforts in collecting their information,
but some details are not as accurate as one could hope: on the development of the Nabataean script into Arabic they should have read a paper by Leila Nehmé
(published in M.C.A. Macdonald [ed.], The Development of Arabic Based on Old and New Epigraphic material [Oxford: Supplement to the Proceedings of the
Seminar for Arabian Studies, 40, 2010]) and another one by the present reviewer would have provided them with the first results of a research on the Umayyad
Qur'anic scripts (in Essays in Honour of Salāh al-Dīn al-Munajjid [London: al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2002]).

Mysticism and speculation have certainly played a role in the calligraphers’ milieus and Annemarie Schimmel has produced very inspired pages on this aspect in
her Calligraphy and Islamic Culture (London: I.B. Tauris 1990). Moustafa and Sperl are obviously pursuing this lead as suggested by the ney-qalam on the cover (also
on p. 109). They should however have questioned the tendency present in Mamlūk literature on calligraphy to rely on a vocabulary borrowed from the religious
sphere, probably because the theoreticians of the script were also members of the ʿulamāʾ milieu. It is probably not a coincidence if the number of dots defining
the size of the alif is the same as the number of the canonical readings enforced by Ibn Mujāhid with Ibn Muqla's support.

Volume Two, From Geometric Pattern to Living Form, is a beautifully illustrated catalogue of examples based on the conclusions reached in the last four chapters of
Volume 1 (pp. 188–285). Each letter of the Arabic alphabet is scrutinised according to the principles the authors have extracted from the treatise attributed to Ibn
Muqla and checked against two model manuscripts, one by al-Ṭayyibī, the other one being the so-called Bāysunghur Qur'an. The attribution of the latter to an
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 earlier calligrapher, ʿUmar Aqṭaʿ, is mentioned on p. 279, which makes all the more problematic expressions like ‘traced by … Bāysunghur’ (p. 257), ‘samples traced
by al-Ṭayyibī and Bāysunghur’ (p. 296) or ‘sample jim of Bāysunghur’ (p. 334), etc. which convey the idea that Bāysunghur was the calligrapher. This slight disregard
for this kind of details is perhaps also the reason of lack of any information about the materiality of the manuscripts, which might be important owing to the
monumentality of the so-called Bāysunghur Qur'an.

Moustafa and Sperl's book fails to fully convince that Ibn Muqla was the author of the treatise and that the ‘proportioned script’ resembled that beautifully
illustrated by a wealth of plates. It lags behind a recent approach, perhaps less impressive but historically sounder, which tries to take into consideration the
documents themselves—manuscripts, inscriptions, or documents—and elaborate a history of the Arabic script. The two magnificent volumes constitute
nevertheless an outstanding tribute to the splendour of Arabic calligraphy.

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 About this Journal

The Journal of Qur'anic Studies is a triannual, bilingual, peer-reviewed journal that aims to encourage and promote the study of the Qur’an from a wide range of
scholarly perspectives, reflecting the diversity of approaches characteristic of this field of scholarship. JQS publishes articles both in English and Arabic, to
encourage the bridging of the gap between the two traditions of Muslim and Western scholarship. The Journal of Qur'anic Studies is principally dedicated to the
publication of original papers, with a book review section including reviews of new works on the Qur’an in the various languages of the Muslim world, as well as the
output of the western academic presses.

JQS also includes a ‘Notes and Correspondence’ section, which is intended as a space for members of the Qur’anic studies community to contribute news and
information on current research, projects and developments in the field, including new courses, conferences, Qur’an-related activities on the Internet, CD-Rom
releases, and other
items of interest.

JQS is published by Edinburgh University Press on behalf of the Centre for Islamic Studies at SOAS.

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