Calligraphy and Arabic are sisters of the same marrow – one has not existed without the other. From the inception of written Arabic, well after an era of oral tradition, taffy-curled lettering has been the staple of religious and historical documentation, of mosque walls and tapestry design. The art of calligraphy cannot ideologically – or practically – be thought of as separate from Arabic. Writing Arabic is scripting art. Writing Arabic is a form of calligraphy, by virtue of flow and form. Arabic’s earliest written form surfaced in the 4th century CE, evolving from what was then known as Nabatean: a pre-Arab civilization that saturated the Levant and northern Arabia. This was an era prior to that of islam, where Arabic was a recited tradition rather than a written art. For centuries, most notably after the revelation of the Quran in the early 7th century CE, Arabs were speakers rather than scribes; they were poets and verse-rhymers, sharp-witted and fierce. With the advent of religion and the need to document what was now a widely growing faith, Islamic scholars began writing down Quranic verses, qasa’id (long odes), and much of…
