Almost 40 years ago I learnt to read Arabic. I can no longer remember what it was like not to be able to read it and I find it difficult to imagine what the exotic squiggles might look like to someone who is incapable of interpreting them.
It is hard therefore for me to guess what the works of art now on display at the British Museum’s Word into Art exhib-ition of modern Middle Eastern art will look like to someone who cannot decipher the Arabic lettering since, as its catalogue says, “a powerful theme running through all the works is how artists engage and experiment with the Arabic script”. Most of the works on display are on paper, though a few are ceramic, brick, metal, or plastic.
In very nearly all of them the Arabic script dominates. The naskhi (cursive) script runs like water over a variety of surfaces. The drooping nastaliq, favoured by Persian calligraphers, may look to some eyes like melted ice-cream. The tall and stately thuluth slowly marches across pages and canvases. The squarish letters of north African Kufic perhaps resemble so many ancient seals. The minute letters of ghurab, or dust script, often employed to letter miniature Korans, appear as so many swarming ants. Individual con-sonants separated from one another and boxed into grids resemble the cabalistic components of magic-working diagrams and indeed that is often exactly what they are. Taken as a whole, the deployment of the Arabic alphabet to achieve aesthetic effects may appear to the outsider as a special case of abstract art.
The case must be different for an Arab or an Arabist, or for someone who knows Persian or Ottoman Turkish. For a start, some of the works on display may summon memories of early reading experiences. The Tunis-ian artist Nja Mahdaoui has used densely packed columns of Arabic to decorate the pages of a recent French translation of The Arabian Nights in an outstanding example of book art. Within The Arabian Nights itself, a common term of praise applied to stories is that they are “worthy to be graven in the corner of an eye with a needle”. This may be the inspiration behind the disturbing photographic image produced by Shirin Neshat of an eye, on the white of which a Persian poem about the death of a garden has been inscribed in tiny letters. Then again, the child-bright, pure colours of Dia al-Azzawi’s sculptures and paintings also made me think of illustrated children’s books (especially the adventures of Tintin). But al-Azzawi, who is one of the greatest Arab artists working today and perhaps the star of the exhibition, deals with more serious themes, as will become apparent.
A western tourist going round the palace of the Alhambra in Granada may revel in the intricately decorative script that sprouts and sends out offshoots that entwine beguilingly with leafy arabesques, producing an overall effect that is satisfyingly close to a fairyland version of an Islamic palace. But the experience must be different for a Muslim who can actually read the inscriptions on the walls and ceilings. Most of them are religious in content and affirm God’s power, threaten the judgment to come and call the believer to repentance.
Arabic is the language of Islam. Most Muslims believe the Arabic Koran has existed from eternity and that the revelation of the Koran cannot properly be translated into any other language. The first section of the four into which Word into Art is divided is devoted to religious calligraphy and imagery. Here one finds such pleasingly austere calligraphic compositions as Nassar Mansour’s “Kun”. “Kun” means “Be” and alludes to the Koranic phrase where God “says ‘Be’ and it is”. The stark lettering of black and gold on white resembles the early medieval ceramics produced in Nishapur and Samarkhand, which carried inscriptions in black or brown on white slipware. But the room also contains more elaborate examples of calligraphy in the service of faith, such as Ahmad Moustafa’s painting of a great cube, which has been split open to reveal within it 99 smaller cubes, on each of which one of the 99 names of God appears in Kufic.
In this room the discipline of the traditional calligraphic training predominates. But it is worth noting that not all the calli-graphers are Muslims and some Christian Arabs have worked with texts from the Bible.
The second section of the exhibition is devoted to the inter-action between literature and calligraphy. It is here that the non-Arabist is likely to be at the greatest disadvantage, as in many cases the artists have worked closely with writers to redouble the effect of the original text through calligraphic devices. The Algerian artist Rachid Koraïchi has transformed a poem, “L’enfant jazz”, by his compatriot Mohammed Dib, into three intricately compartmentalised textual scripts that unmistakably echo the talismanic magic squares that have played such a large part in traditional Islamic culture. Al-Azzawi, by contrast, uses bright, figurative imagery to illuminate five poems by the famous Syro-Lebanese poet Adonis. Apart from contemporary writers, medieval Sufi mystics such as al-Hallaj, al- Niffari and Rumi have proved to be particularly popular choices for artists of the book.
The third section deals with the deployment of Arabic lettering in more abstract and formal ways. Here there are no texts to be deciphered, as the letters have been recruited by abstract artists, often ones who have trained in Europe or America but who on returning to their homelands have used elements from the Arabic alphabet to assert the Middle Eastern identity of their visual experiments. Curiously, abstraction overlaps with occultism, as in Koraïchi’s silk banner with its magical emblems, or Farid Belkahia’s wood and parchment renderings of the Moroccan Gnawa cult, or the Tunisian Khalid Slimane’s enchanting, painted cones that echo the traditional conical hats of dervishes and conjurors.
The fourth section is perhaps a kind of Bluebeard’s chamber, as here pious certainties, old reading pleasures and magical icons are set aside. In their place we find graffiti scrawls and images of complaint, exile and war. The dissolution of traditional social forms, the status of women, the future of Palestine and the current sufferings of Iraq are all at issue here. Particularly striking is the way that Iranian artists work with photographs, which are sometimes touched up or arranged in collages, in order to comment on social change. In this final part of the exhibition the art is challenging, but it offers few easy aesthetic pleasures. Word into Art is the finest and most interesting exhibition of modern Middle Eastern art to be held in Britain in living memory.
‘Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East’, British Museum, London, to September 2. Tel +44 020 7323 8299. Sponsored by Dubai Holding
