by Rafik Schami
At the time, Hamid had had an idea. He was lying in bed early in the morning. As always, he was left to his own devices, for his father and mother took no notice of him in those days. His mother was always awake at dawn, but she never once woke him. His father snored in bed until ten. So Hamid learned to get up early and fetch warm fresh bread from the bakery, to make his favourite flatbreads with thyme and olive oil. He ate one in the kitchen, and wrapped the other in a paper bag for later. He washed thoroughly, perfumed himself with a drop of lemon-blossom oil, and set off for his master’s studio, whistling. He was looking forward to the work, and to not having to go home until evening.
He told Master Serani his idea, and when Serani, admiring it, nodded his head, Hamid wrote down the sentence: “The letters are dancing, and the lines become music for the eye.”
Master Serani had corrected only one word. “Not for the eye, music for the soul.” Both then and later Hamid thought that too high-flown, so he did not change it in his notebook.
He smiled.
He had covered three pages with reflections on the degree of difficulty of the various letters. For him, the letter H was difficult to control. However, Master Serani said that anyone who could write an elegant U need fear no other letter. The journeyman Hassan, he had said in the notebook, thought that R gave him the most trouble, because it only looked easy to write, yet its elegance determined the form of an entire word.
Poor Hassan, thought Hamid now, he had died when a horse ran wild and kicked him on the temple in his parents’ stable. He leafed quickly on until he found the photograph that he had stuck in the middle of one page: Master Serani and his assistants on an outing to picnic beside the river Barada. Hassan was holding his shashlik skewer up to the photographer like a sword. A pity, he had been a good soul, and did not deserve to die like that in a stable.
Hamid turned back to his pages on the degrees of difficulty. A couple of pages later he had noted down an argument between Serani and two of his colleagues. Hamid had been going to withdraw to the back rooms of the workshop after the errand boy had made coffee for the guests, but the master insisted that his best pupil should stay to hear the discussion. So he sat in a corner of the large room and listened to their debate.
His entry, however, showed that his mind had not been entirely on the argument. Only a few scraps of the conversation, and some striking sayings, had been caught in the coarse sieve of his attention. They were loosely set down side by side like pebbles. In those days Hamid had been in love with a pretty Christian girl. She worked as a maidservant in a big house, halfway between his home and his master’s studio. She was five or six years older than Hamid, and very courageous. He had kissed her a couple of times, and she always waited at her window for him to pass by. However, a week before the dispute mentioned in the notebook, she had suddenly disappeared. All he knew about her was her name: Rosa.
He had written, “The Quran, after all, is written in Arabic,” and after it in brackets: Sheikh Mustafa.
“The Quran was revealed in Mecca and Medina, recorded in Baghdad, recited in Egypt, but written most beautifully of all in Istanbul,” had said Master Serani.
No one could have understood the splintered ideas he had noted down while he was lost in the ocean of his grief for Rosa. He had written them down at the time just in case his master asked about them later, but he never did.
Only later did he find out for himself that, although the Arabs and the Persians had contributed to creating script, it was the Ottomans who had done most for Arabic calligraphy. Ottoman calligraphers developed script to artistic perfection. They also invented several new styles such as Diwani, Diwani gali, Tughra, Ruq’a, and Sunbuli.
In the middle of an otherwise blank page, Hamid found the words, underlined in red: “I am going to invent a new style.” He later proudly showed this remark to his master, who only shook his head. “These are the high-spirited leaps of a foal. Learn to breathe properly as you write first. You get so excited that you pant like a puppy in the blazing sun,” he said kindly.
“Proximity sometimes magnifies incidentals and makes us overlook what is essential,” he had written a few pages further on, quoting the unfortunate journeyman Hassan, “so no wonder that prophets, writers, painters, musicians, and calligraphers have suffered most from their surroundings.”
How right the poor man was. Hassan must have known more than he showed. An unpretentious farmer’s son with a razor-sharp mind, and unlucky. He had remained a bachelor because he limped; he had broken his right leg as a child, and someone had botched the job of setting it in plaster so that the bone would knit properly.
Hamid had been just twelve when he was to help Hassan with a complicated ornament one day. That morning they heard a loud argument between two of their master’s friends about Arabic script. Serani himself remained neutral, agreeing politely now with one, now with the other, and they could tell from his voice and his remarks that he would have liked to cut the debate short.
Hassan took the side of the guest who was against regarding the language and its characters as sacred in themselves. “You can use the same characters to write both the best and the worst words,” he said. “And Arabic characters can’t have been invented by God. They’re full of drawbacks.”
Hamid had written that on a blank page as well, underlining it in red, as if he had already guessed that it was the seed of a doubt that would change his life.
8
Hamid had read many books about various scripts, describing and listing all the sounds and words that could be only poorly expressed in Arabic script, collecting examples of the weaknesses of the script and the language, and containing proposals put forward over many centuries by reformers.
He looked at a title that he had written out carefully in the Naskhi style: “Reform of Arabic script. A treatise by the slave of God Hamid Farsi.” He had learnt the description “slave of God” from his master at the time, when he was sixteen, and he used it until he set up independently and decided that it was hypocritical modesty.
Now he reread the plans that he had formulated several times over a period of two years, writing them down on loose sheets of paper before transferring them to the notebook, and was proud of their fresh approach and their precision. He had set out his proposals for reform on fifty pages, in tiny but legible script, establishing the fundamental principles of three new styles.
Arabic script had developed no further for over a thousand years, and calligraphy had not changed in a hundred and fifty years. Only a few improvements of his own master had been recognized, and a horrible Egyptian script whose inventor, Muhammad Mahfouz, had designed it for King Fouad I in a spirit of pure opportunism. Emulating the Europeans, he proposed to introduce capital letters, and he also wanted to reshape each letter so that it represented a crown. As a result he called his laboured invention Crown style. He thought that hardly anyone would notice this retrograde step.
In his notebook, Hamid had set out two great weaknesses of Arabic script that only a calligrapher could solve: “Arabic characters,” he wrote, “are written in four different ways, depending on whether they are at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word, or stand on their own.” That is to say, a student must learn over a hundred different forms of letters. He went on, “Many Arabic characters resemble each other, and are distinguishable only through the addition of one, two, or three dots. A new script should be devised in which every letter is written in only one way and cannot be confused with any other,” he noted, arrogant and radical as all revolutionaries are.
In the course of his work he recognized the third weakness of Arabic script. “Some letters are superfluous, others are lacking.” He called his proposals: “The Effective Alphabet.”
He experimented for countless days and nights, learning many alphabets. By now he was nineteen, and he was waiting for an opportunity to put his proposals for reform to his master. He felt sure of himself, yet he could already see Serani’s sceptical expr
ession. He was very conservative, and it was difficult to win his approval for any innovations. He firmly rejected the idea of separating the letters in writing, which was coming into fashion just then. It was nothing but a cheap attempt to curry favour with Europeans, he said, calligraphy for tourists who couldn’t read Arabic, in fact calligraphy for the illiterate.
“No, Arabic art consists of giving form to entire words, not to separate letters. If a Frenchman incorporates a Chinese word in a surrealist picture, do we call it Chinese calligraphy?” he asked ironically.
There were many calligraphers, and Hamid despised them, who provided pictures of exactly that kind for oil sheikhs, the majority of whom were now illiterate. Huge oil paintings with a jumble of letters in the shape of deserts and oases, or camels and caravans, compositions that spared the sheikhs any implied reproof. They would hang these representational paintings in their own rooms, which was forbidden by Islam.
Master Serani rejected not only this bad habit but also imitation of the Japanese and large-scale calligraphy with brushes, also coming into fashion at the time.
“As if a donkey had dipped his tail in ink and wiped it over the paper,” he said scornfully when his journeyman Hassan showed him the work of a colleague executed in this way.
So Hamid prepared himself for a difficult confrontation with his master. Serani had always been the father figure Hamid dreamed of, and he did not want to keep the subject that entirely obsessed his heart and mind secret from him any longer. He would accept a disagreement, perhaps even dismissal.
But it did not turn out that way.
At this phase, Hamid felt like a tent pitched in a storm. He reacted impatiently and with irritation to the apprentices’ jokes and mistakes. One night he could not sleep, and his restlessness drove him out of bed. He decided to go to the studio. He was the only one, apart from Master Serani himself, who had a key to it.
At this hour the first signs of dawn were already tentatively appearing in the dark streets. When he saw light in the studio in the distance, he was surprised, and feared one of the journeymen might have left the light on all night.
To his great surprise, he saw Master Serani sitting at his desk, reading his, Hamid’s, notebook.
“You have been very bold and reaped a good harvest. I have read through your proposals for improvements twice. The book was on my desk. I wouldn’t leave it lying around if I were you. It contains jewels for connoisseurs, and they are a knife in the hand of the ignorant,” he said.
Hamid suddenly felt cold. He poured himself some of the hot tea that his master had just made, and sat down on a small chair opposite him.
“As if an angel’s hand had led you to me,” said Serani, looking thoughtfully at Hamid. “It’s incredible; I woke after two hours of sleep and felt that I had to come here. Sometimes such a feeling is a premonition of disaster. I come in and see your notebook lying on my desk. I open it, and what do I read? Exactly what I myself wrote in secret twenty years ago. I read your fifty pages twice, and compared them with what I said. Here, this is my notebook; you’re welcome to read it, for you are no longer my pupil but my young colleague,” he said, taking a large but rather thinner notebook out of his desk drawer. Every page was hand-ruled and carefully covered with writing. Hamid leafed through it, but he was so excited that he could hardly read anything.
“Our notebooks are identical in both their good and their bad points. I find exactly the same mistakes as I made myself in your work as well.”
“What kind of mistakes?” asked Hamid, his throat dry.
“Wishing to reduce the alphabet – what you call an ‘effective alphabet’ is what I called just ‘an alphabet.’ You want to prune away twelve characters; I would have removed fourteen. Today I think – perhaps it’s my advancing age speaking – that would not be an improvement after all, but an act of destruction.”
“Destruction?” Hamid was wide awake now. “And what about all the duplications of some letters, and the superfluous letter LA, made of two single letters that already occur in the alphabet written together as a single sign?”
“I don’t want to discourage you. The Prophet added the letter LA to the alphabet, and so it will stay until the end of the world. If you will take my advice, do not reject a single letter, because if you do the whole Islamic world will be against you, for those letters are in the Quran. The Arabic language has only twenty-nine letters, and the more of them you destroy, the more uncertain and imprecise the language itself will be. But there is nothing for you to be ashamed of. That was the third proposition in my own notebook. At the time I was even more radical than you. I wagered that the Arabic language could be reproduced perfectly with only fifteen letters. Today I can only laugh at that. Do you know any English?”
Hamid shook his head. The only European language he had learnt at school was a little French.
“English has many letters that appear in a written word but are not pronounced; others disappear from the mouth as soon as two of them are contained in a word, like gh in night and light. Delightful, don’t you think? Two letters sitting quietly side by side and watching the others. Others again sometimes wear the mask of other letters, either singly or in pairs. O, for instance, often likes to camouflage itself as U. Incidentally, a friend of mine counted over seventy different ways of writing letters that give you an I in English. And the I itself is not short of different forms. There are also letters like C and H that, once they merge, produce a new letter that is not in the English alphabet. That’s riches. The clever English never throw a letter away, but sometimes combine several letters to make a new one. They keep everything, so that they can read texts of the past or the future. A wish to do away with letters was also one of the sins of my youth…”
Serani smiled, embarrassed, and flapped his hand as if driving away his mistakes like troublesome flies. He poured more tea.
“The French disguise the three letters A, U, and X, when they meet, as the letter O,” said Hamid, searching his scanty knowledge to keep up.
Serani leafed through Hamid’s notebook for a long time, drank his tea, and said nothing, as if he had not heard him.
“Exactly. One never removes a letter,” he said at last, as if he had been looking for a conclusive argument all this time, “when the millennia have shaped it, but the French and English don’t even have a Quran, and the Quran, as long as you call yourself a Muslim, is the word of God. So be careful, my boy, because at this point matters become dangerous. They did then, they do now. One must be on the watch for fanatics. A colleague of mine paid with his life for wanting to imitate the Turks and suggesting abolishing Arabic characters and introducing the Roman alphabet. He wouldn’t listen to me.” A look of grief came into Serani’s face. “No,” he said quietly, “such a thing would have to be prepared for in secret over a long period, one would have to win over more and more scholars who could later defend a cautious reform publicly with all the force of their authority. Nothing can be done without them.”
“But they will never agree to such a revolution,” replied Hamid.
“Who’s talking about a revolution? Nothing will be overturned. It’s just that the alphabet will be extended so that Arabic becomes the most elegant and efficient language in the world. That’s why I think well of your second proposal: you write that our alphabet needs four – I myself would say six – new letters so that it can give perfect expression to Turkish, Persian, Japanese, Chinese, and all the languages written in the Roman alphabet. No one will touch the Quran and its characters, but a modern script becomes increasingly important for our modern way of life. You are on the right road there. And it will be a good idea to devise new forms for letters so that they no longer cause confusion, but that can’t be done in a day. It will take a century and great care for the best shape of the letters to crystallize.”
“And suppose scholars say that goes against Islam because the Arabic language is sacred and can contain no more letters than the Quran?”
“
They’ll say that anyway, but you can silence them by reminding them that Arabic has already been reformed two or three times. The characters used to write out the first copies of the Quran looked different, had no dots, and were reformed several times in the course of a thousand years before they assumed the shape they take today. You can also point out that Persian is written in an extended Arabic alphabet of thirty-two letters, and ask if that has made the Persians less devout and worse Muslims.”
Serani rose and went to the window. He watched the street sweepers doing their work at this early hour closely for a while. “Perhaps what I am about to say will offend you, so promise me to say nothing for a day before you answer me. I know how much trouble you take, and you are closer to me than my only son, who doesn’t want to know anything about calligraphy. But you have something that I never had. Your divine talent has made you proud, and pride leads to arrogance. Calligraphy, however, is an art of modesty. Only a man with a humble heart can open the last gates of its mysteries. Arrogance is a sly quality; you don’t notice its influence, but it will lead you into blind alleys.”
Hamid caught his breath. He was near tears. Suddenly he felt Serani’s small hand on his shoulder. He started, because he had not heard his master’s footsteps.
“Take this notebook of mine and read it today. You are excused from work. Read it. You will see that I have spent over twenty years trying to devise just one new style. I have not succeeded, not because I have no imagination, but because the old Ottomans left hardly anything for us to do. And what are you about? You write that you have devised seven new styles and three of them are fully developed. But let us look at them closely. The style that you call Morgana looks like a drunken version of Thuluth. Your Pyramid style forcibly reduces all the letters to triangular shape. Fantasia has no structure, and what you call Modern I resembles a rope cut into pieces. There is no internal music to the characters. Salim style is inelegant. And finally, the style to which, in friendship to me, you have given my name. It looks strange to me. A calligrapher need not devise so much novelty. If you concentrate on a single innovation, a single style, you will realize how difficult genuine invention is. And if it is successful, it immortalizes you.”