Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: 

The Classical Age 1300–1600 (London: Phoenix Press, 

K  126  

caliphate

---

2000); Hugh Kennedy, The Armies of the Caliphs: Mili-

tary Society in the Early Islamic State (New York: Rout-

ledge, 2001); Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 

1700–1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 

2000); David Wasserstein, The Caliphate in the West: 

An Islamic Institution in the Iberian Peninsula (Oxford: 

Clarendon Press, 1993).

calligraphy

The term calligraphy comes from Greek kalli-

graphia, meaning beautiful writing, or the visual 

elaboration of written scripts known in Arabic as 

khatt (line).

Within the field of Islamic 

art

, calligraphy 

refers to stylized scripts in languages that use (or 

used) the Arabic 

alphabet

, among them Arabic, 

Persian, Urdu, and Ottoman Turkish. The word 

that designates the practice and the forms of styl-

ized writing is khatt, whose basic meaning as line 

associates it with both architectural planning and 

geometry. As calligraphy, khatt means penman-

ship or an individual hand, and khattat applies to 

a master practitioner of khatt as a visual art form 

(but also to sign painters).

The status of Arabic as the shared language 

of Islamic scriptures led Orientalist historians to 

associate stylized scripts exclusively with reli-

gious values and, at the same time, to consider 

this writing a subset of (meaningless) 

arabesqUe

ornamentation. The practice of stylized writing, 

in fact, has a number of internal histories that 

governed forms, aesthetic criteria, and contextual 

meanings. These histories show that changes in 

the forms of letters indicate historical disruptions 

rather than continuities; the adoption or rejection 

of particular scripts was a conscious means of 

expressing desired meanings through form.

The rationalization of scripts in 10th- and 

11th-century  i

raq

 produced a new canon of 

writing in which clarity, legibility, and harmony 

defined aesthetic quality in khatt. But this writ-

ing reform also allowed its Abbasid sponsors to 

order and control the output of scribes and to 

create a visual system that immediately expressed 

loyalty to them as opposed to rivals such as the 

Fatimids, who continued the use of angular 

forms. This example demonstrates that the much 

romanticized art of Islamic calligraphy neither 

follows an evolutionary line in which angular 

letters naturally mutated into rounded ones, nor 

reflects identical and unchanging Islamic ideals, 

but rather highlights distinctions among them. 

Qazi Ahmad’s 17th-century Persian treatise on 

calligraphy similarly illustrates views governed 

by a different time, place, and group ideology 

and ascribes the invention of beautiful writing to 

Imam Ali (d. 661), patron saint of Iranian callig-

raphers of the time.

Finally, the United States postal stamp 

designed by khattat Muhammad Zakariya (whose 

training comprises a spiritual content) illustrates 

the use of calligraphy to symbolize the presence 

of Muslims in the country. In this instance, an 

official document again embraces khatt as a sign 

of a particular community but deploys it as an 

item of identity politics in a new cultural and 

historical setting that reinterprets it to fit this 

context.

See also  a

rabic

 

langUage

 

and

 

literatUre

; 

F

atimid

 

dynasty

;  i

bn

 

al

-b

aWWab

,  a

bU

 

al

-h

asan

a

li

 

ibn

 h

ilal

; i

bn

 m

Uqla

, a

bU

 a

li

 m

Uhammad

.

Nuha N. N. Khoury