The tale of two Alphabets

Gutenberg’s revolution, which made possible many other technological revolutions in Western Europe and North America, couldn’t have happened without two highly significant characteristics of the Roman alphabet. First, the isolated nature of its letterforms and, second, the fact that the shape of each letterform is wholly independent of its context.

Visual language says a great deal about a culture and in particular these two alphabetic characteristics say a great deal about that of ‘the West’. This was a culture that valued the breaking down of things into simple, consistent and context-independent components - so as to exercise greater control and effectiveness over those things - whether the ‘thing’ in question was a system, a process or an aesthetic composition. And the monks of the mediaeval scriptoria, whose incanabulae Gutenberg so carefully copied, clearly understood this: they had produced the alphabetic characteristics that enabled Gutenberg’s revolution to facilitate a proto-industrial process of document production. It was this emphasis on decontextualisation – literally, separating the letterform from its context – that later gave birth to the stripped back aesthetic of modernist typography.

The Arabic alphabet, which was common to all of the languages of the Islamic world (principally Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu) provided a different trajectory to modernity. Arabic may only have 28 letters but in writing the appearance of each one of those letters depends, critically, on whether it appears at the beginning, middle or end of a word (and in fine calligraphy this is extended to include a much wider range of variations). Furthermore, although its letterforms are no less considered than their Roman counterparts, each is valued less, aesthetically, than the beauty of the unique word shape they contribute to (and, indeed, than the form of the whole text). The Arabic letter is inseparably part of a whole – which makes for exquisite calligraphy, dependent entirely upon the fine judgment of the calligrapher – but does not lend itself to a simple, repeatable set of mechanical rules.

For this reason Gutenberg’s revolution did not adapt well to the Arabic alphabet. Admittedly European typefounders like Plantin and Caslon had tried to simplify the Arabic alphabet for casting in metal type, mostly for the printing of missionary tracts. And in the Ottoman Empire the Hungarian printer, diplomat and man of affairs Ibrahim Müteferrika created the first set of printing types that attempted to replicate the complex aesthetics of Arabic calligraphy. But movable type was a technology rooted in the same mindset, and values, that had originally developed the Roman alphabet into a set of context-independent letters. As a technology it was inherently alien to the values behind Arabic calligraphy.

The first waves of digital type did little, too, for Arabic typography. Pixellation was a little kinder to the arabic alphabet than previous technologies like hot metal or photosetting, but the computing power of early desktop computers was not up to the subtleties of connection and contextuality. It was only with the development of type formats like OpenType, which could support extensive glyph substitution – and with increased computer power that was capable of processing the sophisticated algorithms necessary to encode the many subtle rules of Arabic text composition – that this situation began to change.

Of course some limited glyph substitution – the swapping of conjoined ‘logotypes’ for particular combinations of characters – had always existed within Western typography as a means of finessing awkward interactions of letterforms. This was incorporated into digital fonts almost from their beginnings, if only to support the notorious fi and fl ligatures. And as microprocessor capacity increased exponentially through the 1990s, programmers began to apply themselves to enhancing digital type formats so that they could support the more extensive glyph substitution necessary for ‘non Latin’ typography. Suddenly it became possible for Arabic typesetting to aspire to something that had never previously been possible: to create texts that looked as if they had been written by the most exacting Ottoman calligraphers. And this has perhaps reached its culmination in Thomas Milo’s ‘Tasmeem’, which can compose a page of classical Naskh calligraphy according to algorithms so complex they make Western typography look like painting by numbers.

But this hasn’t just brought about the recreation of past glories. What these technologies have done is to make lift Arabic typesetting to a degree of sophistication that cannot be matched by other script systems. And these opportunities are inspiring a whole cohort of young Arab, Iranian and other Arabic alphabet type designers who are introducing all kinds of exciting new ideas. It has also happened at a moment, too, when the unprecedented prosperity of the Gulf States, in particular, has created a demand for Arabic language design at the highest levels. Together these have fuelled an extraordinary explosion of creativity in fields across the whole range of graphic and typographic design.

What is particularly interesting for us in the West is the ‘kickback’ of this explosion into our own ways of working. For instance, the underpinning technologies that make possible the fine control over contextual composition in Arabic language typesetting have also made allowed for the development of Roman fonts with numerous alternative characters and glyph substitutions. The scripts of Argentinian designer Alejandro Paul, for instance, which have been winning awards year after year recently, make extensive use of this. And recently Dutch collective Underware have pushed this even further with the release of their ‘Liza’ type, which attempts – electronically - to recapture many of the unique characteristics of signpainting (such as its innovative ‘out of ink’, ‘t-topper’ and ‘superlooper’ features).

It would be wrong to see this as a purely technological development, however. Just as the recognition that there was a bigger world ‘out there‘ – outside the narrow confines of Latin typography – encouraged type designers to investigate the world’s other great script systems, so over the last decade or so Western societies have been touched in a much broader way by exposure to this bigger world. The cities that were once the bastions of European and North American modernism are now as multi-cultural as anywhere on earth, and digital communications bring us the work of designers from across the globe. Indeed our very sensibilities seem to be changing, and the forces that once drove us towards the spare and the unemotional – ‘form follows function’ – seem to be in reverse gear. In the 2010s it seems more likely that we’ll be celebrating a ‘world design’ aesthetic that is about positive qualities of connection and context, dialogue and relationship – qualities that resonate increasingly strongly for many of us. And, ironically, these are exactly the qualities that have always been implicit in the visual expressions of the Arabic alphabet.

James Souttar [entiendo@mac.com]

Designer

5 comments

I think that the major concept in this text is discourse, at least as i see it.
Discourse as tool to produce tools so them can produce discourse again.
I think discourse is a tool cretaed by the individual so that can affect him. And the opposite also works so it can result in cultural projection of the individual.
What happens is a dialogue between two processes. On the one hand threre’s is abstraction about the subject being turned into concrete discourses. And on the other hand there is concrete discourses turned into abstraction.
This means , for example, if i, based on a particullarity of a chair, design a chair so people can sit on it, people can feel the particullarity.
That’s the way it happens. The danger is when some parts of this process are deleted or pretending to be in construction. For exemple sitting on the chair and not feelling the particullarity.
I think your conclusion is obvious because we live those realities for a long time now in massive way.
What happens is that a lot of thing’s are forgotten (not remembered through ideology), and becoming pretensious naturallities. Because they are forgotten

/helder 25/07/2009

helder, your observations are very interesting and, I think, very important (they also go to show how the process of dialogue itself can be much richer than what any one person has to say).

At the heart of these two modes of visual language - ‘Roman’ and ‘Arabic’ - are two fundamentally different sets of assumptions of the nature of the world, which could be said to form the basic discourse from which these ‘tools’ (the script systems and the idioms and conventions that frame their use) come.

The (Northern) European world view envisages a world of discrete ‘objects’, each of which may have their own reasons for being what and where it is, but which are connected in an accidental or arbitrary way. The world begins by being a random and meaningless collection of individual entities. And, at best, some of these entities can be connected in ways that can be considered more meaningful to an observer (by what we could describe as a ‘curatorial’ mentality). However, the ‘meaning’ is still considered to reside in the observer’s interpretation: the connections between things are not seen to be inherently meaningful. A good example of this, well known to all students of design, is Ferdinand de Saussure’s view that the relationship between sign and signifier (e.g. between ‘word’ and ‘meaning’) is ‘unmotivated’ or arbitrary.

The tradition of ‘Arabic’ Calligraphy (I put the word ‘Arabic’ in quotes, since this tradition reached its apotheosis in the multi-cultural Ottoman Turkish society of the nineteenth century C.E.) is rooted in a very different view of the world, one that is not just reflective of an Islamic perspective but more specifically of the mystical, Sufi view of the ‘Unity of Existence’ (wahdat al-wujud). Most of the great calligraphers of this tradition were either themselves mystics of this kind, or heavily influenced by this form of mysticism. And the basic premise is that everything that appears as diversity or multiplicity is an expression of one single principle, one single Being. In this view, which is not just intellectual but experiential, everything begins by being inherently connected, and those essential connections ramify at every level of existence.

If we look at how these different sets of assumptions relate to the practice of, for instance, a ‘Western’ graphic designer and an ‘Eastern’ calligrapher, we can say that the graphic designer is primarily concerned with a discourse that attempts to relate essentially disconnected things together (the relationship between those things being unrelated to the things themselves) while the caligrapher is concerned with revealing and expressing the fundamental, inherent relatedness of things, and that that revelation or expression is itself a dimension or expression of that relatedness.

In this last week, two topical events brought these two different ways of looking at the world home to me. The first was the fortieth anniversary of the first landing on the Moon. Neil Armstrong - the one who took that ‘giant leap for mankind’ - was asked afterwards how he felt when he was waiting for takeoff on that historic mission. He is said to have replied: “I knew that I was sitting on top of more than a million separate components - and that the contract for every single one of them had gone to the lowest bidder!” It is significant that going to the moon is seen as the ultimate triumph of Western civilization, yet even unwittingly the man who did it could recognise the basis on which it was achieved: the ability to manufacture and assemble a million separate components.

The other event was the admission, yesterday, by British Foreign Minister David Milliband, that peace in Afghanistan can only be achieved by talking to the Taliban.

And the juxtaposition between these two events is revealing: forty years ago America put two men on the moon, but it was fighting a losing battle against ‘insurgency’ in Vietnam. For all the technological achievements of the last forty years, and the resulting technological prowess of the United States’ military, it is till fighting losing battles against insurgency.

Technology, economic and military supremacy, cultural hegemony and all of the other substantial achievements of the European/North American world view - achieved by breaking things down into individual parts and processes and then assembling them together into complex ’systems’ - still is incapable of bringing about such a simple and basic human need as peace. Yet it is not as if the answer to this is unknown: merely that it is resisted. To bring about peace, one needs to recognise that all of humanity is inherently connected - and begin the dialogue that brings out those connections.

As the thirteenth century C.E. Sufi poet Saadi wrote (a frequent text for Arabic Calligraphy):

All Adam’s children are limbs of one body, created from one essence.
If fate brings suffering to one limb, the others cannot remain at rest.
Those who do not feel the pain of others, do not deserve to be called human.

/james souttar 29/07/2009

Since Monika originally asked me to provide some links with this piece - which I forgot - here are links to the websites of three of the most innovative and well known contemporary Arabic calligraphers. Significantly all three have admitted to the influence of Sufism in their work.

http://www.massoudy.net Hasan Massoudy, an Iraqi born calligrapher who now lives and works in Paris, and is best known for the development of this expressive and ‘painterly’ form of calligraphy, using such things as the ends of planks as ‘pens’.

http://www.nja-mahdaoui.com Tunisian Nja Mahdaoui, who is also a painter, and who has developed a unique style of calligraphy.

http://www.arabigraphy.com Iraqi born Mustafa Ja’far, who also trained as a painter and works as a graphic designer and art director, but who was taught Arabic calligraphy by the great ‘traditional’ master of the twentieth century, Hashim Muhammad al-Baghdadi, who they call ‘al-kattat’, *The* calligrapher.

/james souttar 29/07/2009

Interesting article James. If you’ve not already come across it there is a timely project called Typographic Matchmaking instigated by The Khatt Foundation in which ‘10 Arab and Dutch designers collaborate on designing Arabic companions for Dutch fonts’.
http://www.mediamatic.net/page/21498/en

The assumed superiority of culturally contingent forms has a rich history. Despite not being concerned with Arabic character design you may wish to track down a copy of The New Hebrew Typography which provides a powerful insight into the assumed superiority of particular cultural subjects.
There is an overview here
http://www.geocities.com/snortar/schonfield.html

/MLA 31/07/2009

“The assumed superiority of culturally contingent forms…” I’m not sure this is about the assumption of superiority of ‘culturally contingent forms’, though. What is most interesting, to me at any rate, about cultural evolution is what ‘takes’ and what doesn’t. Schonfield’s experiments are interesting, certainly, but even Schonfield doesn’t think his alphabet is likely to be taken up. In this sense, it sits in a tradition of heroic failures (and reminds me of poet Robert Bridges attempts to reform the Roman alphabet which, despite the fact he was British Poet Laureate and had enlisted the support of such contemporary typographic luminaries as Stanley Morison and Frederic Goudy, is now merely a historical footnote).

Another recent example is Saad D. Abulhab attempt to create a ’simplified Arabic alphabet’, about which the New York Times says:

“Mr. Abulhab created an Arabic alphabet that replicated some of the simpler principles of written English. He designed letters that took one form wherever they appeared in a word, could be printed in block style, and could appear as separate letters instead of connected in cursive form. That alphabet could then be written from left to right for those more comfortable with the pattern of English, or from right to left in the traditional Arabic manner.”

“The whole thing came about because my 6-year-old daughter did not want to learn to read Arabic because she said it was written backwards,” said Mr. Abulhab, an Iraqi-American who was born in California and spent his childhood in Baghdad.”

Abulhab’s alphabet may well respond to the needs of Arab Americans - like him and his daughter - but the project of recasting the Arabic Alphabet in the image of the Roman is not likely to respond to the needs of those for whom American is written backwards. Indeed, what emerges from this story is how the basic cultural assumptions (what Anthropologist Edward T. Hall described as ‘primary culture’) remain unexamined. Letters that take one form wherever they appear in a word may well be superior to people who expect letters to take one form wherever they appear in a word (and for whom letters taking one form wherever they appear in a word corresponds to a deeper cultural pattern that privileges the decontextualised). It is unlikely to commend itself to readers for whom such decontextualisation not only goes against convention, but seems like a fundamental violation of the natural order.

For me, this point goes back to whether we see the world as a fundamentally arbitrary or a fundamentally connected system. If we believe culture is simply a series of isolated accidents, then making individual interventions to ’steer’ that culture in one direction or another makes some sort of sense. Such a point of view, too, might lead us to see the general ‘cultural drift’ as being due to the ‘assumed superiority of particular cultural subjects’.

But why, then, in the area of ‘deep’ or ‘fundamental’ culture - such as language - do we never see the imprint of individual contributions, even in contemporary societies? Why do attempts to create new languages (like ‘Esperanto’) or even new alphabets (like those of Schonfield or Bridges or even Abulhab) fail? And where hugely complex cultural artefacts like languages and alphabets come from, if they are not ‘designed’ (or ‘redesigned’) in this sort of way?

If, on the other hand, one conceives that there may be a fundamental connection beween - say - a ‘culture’ and its ‘cultural artefacts’ - then these questions become easier to answer. Cultural evolution appears to respond to changes or developments in a people’s (however we define this) *receptivity*. And the cultural innovations that ‘take’ tend to be things that are so palpably ‘in the air’ that they occur to numerous people at the same time. Even in a phenomenon as recent as ‘psychedelia’, we can see how certain stylistic approaches, which could not have appeared even five years before, started simultaneously to appear in the work of designers and others who were not aware of each others’ work. (The same principle can be found in other areas, too, such as scientific discovery).

Jung observed that: “The secret of artistic creation and the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to the state of ‘participation mystique’ – to that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual”, and there is something of a clue here. From the point of view of a ‘connected’ weltanschaaung, creative approaches that don’t draw on a ‘participation mystique’ in the zeitgeist, fail. Those who are in tune with the ’self-manifestation of an evolving intent’ - as I’ve heard it described - give that evolving intent form, and the forms they give it in turn speak to the receptivity of their community. This is less ‘cultural contingency’ than ‘cultural necessity’ (using those terms in their original philosophical sense).

/james souttar 01/08/2009

write a comment

we encourage people to recycle your comments in their own research as we may collage them into our own writing with the aim to publish the resulting articles (any post eventually used will be credited). We encourage comments to be 200 words or more.

line and paragraph breaks automatic. e-mail address will never be displayed. html allowed: <a href=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>