From ancient Arabic script to Gaza City graffiti, a fascinating exhibition shows that the written word is a cornerstone of Middle Eastern identity, finds Rachel Aspden
To most westerners, Arabic script is familiar only from media images: as a threatening, cryptic tangle on the bandannas of suicide bombers, on banners carried through the streets of Gaza or Basra, or in the rolling captions on al-Jazeera news clips. Yet the history of the written Arabic word is, in reality, a volatile 1,500-year-old blend of religion, magic, politics and art. Today, artists working with Arabic are just as likely to use InDesign or a spray can as the calligrapher's pen of 24 neatly cut donkey hairs, but they draw on the same complex tradition. "Word Into Art", based on the British Museum's rarely seen contemporary Middle Eastern collection, traces the way in which artists interact with this legacy.
"It's an immense story to tell," says Venetia Porter, curator of the exhibition, as she leads me into a gallery half-hung with calligraphy. "But we've tried to begin at the beginning." As "Word Into Art" emphasises, written Arabic originated as a sacred vehicle for religion. According to the Koran, the Archangel Jibreel delivered the first revelation to Muhammad with the command to recite: "In the name of thy Lord . . . who by the pen taught man what he did not know." When the reluctant (and illiterate) Prophet eventually complied, generations of scribes and calligraphers devised increasingly elaborate scripts in which to copy his words. Constrained by the Islamic taboo on representation, they created a sophisticated art of the word governed by precise rules.
Drawing on this tradition, contemporary artists can instantly invoke a shared Muslim identity through language, stretching back a millennium and a half. This is often a political gesture. Mustapha Kemal Atatürk decreed that Turkish should be written in Roman, not Arabic, script in 1928. Seen in this light, the Japanese calligrapher Fou'ad Kouichi Honda's use of Ottoman mirror writing in his Untitled (2004) is a conscious appeal to Turkey's religious past. But calligraphy can also be used as a less loaded statement of historical continuity. The stark, geometric black lines of Nassar Mansour's Kun (2002) - the title and image are the single word for "be" - derive recognisably from the angular Kufic letters developed by 7th-century scribes in early Islamic Iraq.
The simplicity of Mansour's composition is deceptive. Calligraphers of Arabic still undergo years of master-to-student training. Their endless hours with pen and practice sheets resurface in the work as a fascination with rhythm and repetition, as in Ahmed Moustafa's incantatory, dizzying Attributes of Divine Perfection (1987), a cube split into facets marked with the "Beautiful Names of Allah". Floating before a backdrop of repeated Koranic verses, the image appears computer-generated in its mathematical severity. It is difficult to look at - perhaps even ugly - but hints at the persistent belief in the Arabic word as a carrier of power: the very mathematical proportions of the letters are supposed to express eternal truths and possess magical qualities.
In the Middle East, calligraphy, Koranic verses and Islamic phrases are everywhere, not just in mosques and palaces but in living-rooms, on café walls and on the bumpers of long-distance buses. One of the most fascinating aspects of "Word Into Art" is the interplay between aesthetic refinement and folk tradition: high art and the street corner are in constant conversation. This is not restricted to religious works. Even calligraphic representations of Arabic literary classics are, Porter insists, part of everyday life. "The extent of literacy in the Middle East has been vastly underestimated," she says. "People learn qasidas, pre-Islamic odes, in school. They're part of their everyday lives." The Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri says: "Iranians will utter a poem casually without knowing who it's from."
Resisting the weight of the calligraphic tradition, many mod-ern Middle Eastern artists have retreated to deliberately naive techniques. "I prefer to write the letters in my paintings in the manner of children, school students and semi-intellectuals, rather than in the manner of machines and calligraphers," the Iraqi artist Shakir Hassan al-Said has said. His Al-Hasud la yasud (1979) shows the proverb "The envious shall not prevail", sprayed roughly on to a concrete wall and part-obscured by drips, scratches and blurs of paint in bleak blacks and greys. Other artists, inspired by the immediacy and political charge of Middle Eastern graffiti, are creating a modern art of the word; this new form is described as "calligraffiti".
Laila Shawa, born in Gaza and now working in London, uses an impasto of illegible graffiti as a backdrop to her Children of War, Children of Peace II (1995), a large silk screen of a refugee child that bursts from the wall in a clamour of pinks and yellows. It is, she explains, based on her experiences in Gaza under the first intifada, between 1987 and 1992. "Under Israeli occupation, Palestinians were not allowed to use any form of communication," Shawa says. "Newspapers were banned unless they adhered to censor-ship; radio, television and any form of media were completely outlawed." Under this imposed silence, the walls of Gaza sprouted forests of colourful graffiti. "They became the only means by which Palestinians could communicate, whether to declare a strike, announce the martyrdom of someone, or to threaten someone's life if they were accused of collaboration."
Dismayed by these incitements to resistance, the Israeli army began by imprisoning or shooting anyone caught with a spray can. But the volume of text was simply too great, and the Israelis were soon reduced to painting the graffiti out every evening, only for it to reappear every morning. They became reluctant participants, Shawa suggests, in a dialogue with the inhabitants of the occupied territory. She insists there is no relation between the text that appears in her work and formal calligraphy: "They simply happen to be in the same language." Under occupation, however, the simple act of writing on a wall in Arabic becomes as much an assertion of identity as the framed Koranic texts hanging on the walls of Middle Eastern diaspora homes in Detroit or London.
It is the tension between modernity and history that gives the work in "Word Into Art" its peculiar force. The show closes with two works by the Iranian artist Farkhondeh Shahroudi. A fabric book of thin gauze leaves is painted with crudely drawn, explicit images of women's bodies, menaced by black clouds of Arabic text and spreading red stains. Lying next to them is a pair of black gloves, often required dress for women in the Islamic Republic, with delicate, illegible white script curling its way up the fingers.
Shahroudi's reference to calligraphy is not simply a protest against stifling historical norms. As Porter points out, "There have always been female calligraphers, and they have openly signed their work." Tradition, as Shahroudi's gloves signal, can be both a burden and a source of power.
Around the top of the gallery, above Shahroudi's work, snakes an inscription in an immaculate Thuluth hand. But instead of the familiar Koranic formula "In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful", it spells out the first lines of a poem by Nelly Salameh Amri on the Lebanese civil war: "Today is a blessed day./A day off for the snipers." Whether in the prescribed forms of the ancient Arabic scripts, or through the politically charged calligraffiti of Gaza City, "Word Into Art" shows how closely the Middle East's past and present are entwined.
"Word Into Art: artists of the modern Middle East" opens on 18 May at the British Museum, London WC1 (020 7323 8299). www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
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