The Calligrapher's Secret

by Rafik Schami

  At the end of 1952 Hamid had been told that the Islamic scholars of Aleppo were particularly courageous, but on a visit to them and to several professors in the metropolis of the north of Syria, he met with nothing but rejection.

  When he told Serani about his setback in Aleppo, his master was unmoved, and showed not the slightest solidarity with him. Only as Hamid left did he say, “Don’t try going so fast. People are very slow, and they will lose track of you if you’re too far ahead.”

  At the time Hamid didn’t understand that he was in the process of dissociating himself from his adherents because of the impatience always urging him on.

  His meeting with the minister of culture also seemed to him at first a happy dispensation of providence. In fact it was a bad omen, as he now, in prison, recognized.

  In the middle of April 1953 he received a letter from the Ministry of Culture, which distributed all school textbooks at the time. The new minister, working with authors, teachers, linguists, geographers, natural scientists, illustrators and calligraphers, wanted to bring the textbooks into line with the latest state of knowledge, giving them unity and above all elegance. That was all the invitation said.

  Hamid was to give his expert opinion on all the scripts.

  On the morning of the meeting, he rose at four in the morning with a premonition that this would be an important day. Once he arrived at the Ministry, Hamid found he knew no one but the famous old scholar Sati’ al-Husri, who debated tirelessly in public and was highly respected by the nationalists. He regarded a nation’s language as its most important foundation stone.

  Hamid sat down on the nearest vacant chair and was surprised to see a card with a name that was strange to him. The man next to him explained that the minister had decided in advance who was to sit where. “It’ll be a habit he learned from the French,” added the man sarcastically. Hamid found his own place in between two taciturn printing press owners. Soon all the participants had arrived except for the minister, and it struck Hamid that there was not a single sheikh among this select company.

  Then the minister entered the large room. They could all feel his aura of power right to the furthest seat at the large oval table. George Mansour was a highly educated young literary scholar who after studying in France had worked for a short time as a professor at Damascus University, until President Shishakli gave him the job of reorganizing the schools at the end of 1952.

  Hamid could not understand how the president could have entrusted the education of children in a country with a majority of Muslims to a Christian. But after an hour he was so fascinated by the minister’s charm and vision that he himself no longer understood why he had felt uneasy about it at first.

  “I have not invited the religious teachers because we have to discuss reforms that do not affect religion,” said the minister. “They are invited to a separate meeting tomorrow, at which not I but the learned Sheikh Sabbak will put the new guidelines on which our president has decided before them.

  For today, however, I have invited the two best printers in Damascus so that they can advise us – and come to our rescue if we dream too much! As men acquainted with printers’ ink, they know that it is sometimes impossible to pay for our dreams.”

  The minister knew exactly what he wanted. George Mansour was a gifted speaker, with a better command of Arabic than many Muslim scholars. He juggled quotations, lines of poetry, and anecdotes from Arabic literature with the hand of a master.

  “Damascus has always been the heart of Arabia, and if the heart is sick how is the body to remain healthy?” he asked at the beginning of his speech

  Like most of the men in the room, Hamid was hanging on the speaker’s lips. He seemed to have prepared everything down to the last detail. He introduced his address by saying that the president had given the green light to a radical reform of the educational system, and that he intended to make open and generous scope for action available to them, the experts. Now it was up to them all to make the best of that for Syrian schoolchildren.

  Hamid felt his heart beating fast, for he was beginning to see where the minister’s path was taking them. He had not been wrong.

  “The first radical reform concerns language,” said the minister calmly, “for with language human beings design their thoughts. It is no secret that we have a beautiful language, but one that is also antiquated in many respects. It suffers from several weaknesses that I need not enumerate here. I would like to mention only one, so that you can see how delicate a matter it is to repair the ravages of time. Our language is overloaded with synonyms. No other language in the world shares this weakness, which shimmers as if it were a strength, and even fills many Arabs with pride. We must liberate Arabic from all its dead weight and make it leaner so that it becomes clear. Look at the French. They have reformed their language radically several times, until it became a language fit for modern life and set an example to other nations. Under the influence of Malherbe, the French began cleansing their language as early as 1605. A series of courageous reforms followed. All the steps taken seem to have been inspired by the maxim of the philosopher Descartes, making clarity the first commandment of language. Antoine Comte de Rivarol proclaimed boldly in 1784: Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français, what is not clear is not French.

  “What can we offer by comparison? A word that does not have over fifty synonyms is not Arabic?”

  The men in the room laughed with some restraint.

  “And in fact French is precise,” the minister went on. “Every word has a meaning, but it can also be subject to poetic variation. However, the language is always undergoing renewal, and space is made for modern, living words that are necessary for the purposes of culture. Only this permanent process of rejuvenation drives a language forward and enables it to keep pace with civilization and even help to shape it.

  “Our language is beautiful but diffuse, thus giving great scope to poets but causing confusion in the fields of philosophy and science. You know better than I do that we have over three hundred synonyms for the word ‘lion’ – according to Ibn Faris, as many as five hundred – two hundred for the bear, and an enormous number for wine, camel, and sword.”

  “But all these words are already recorded in dictionaries. Are we to throw them away?” asked a young linguist.

  The minister smiled, as if he had known what was coming, Seventy-year-old Sati’ al-Husri raised his hand. “Young man,” he said in fatherly tones, “not throw them away but put them in the museum and produce new, fresh dictionaries. The Europeans have shown courage and buried the corpses of their words, words that no one uses anymore and only lead to confusion. Here the corpses are still walking around. A dictionary should be the house of living words, not the graveyard of dead ones. Who needs more than five words for a lion? Not I for one. Do you? Two or three for woman and wine are quite enough. Anything else will contaminate the language…”

  “But the Quran – what do you want to do with the synonyms in the Quran?” a grey-haired man with a well-tended moustache interrupted him. He was the author of several books on education.

  “Every word that occurs in the Quran will be in the new dictionaries; no one will touch it. But the Quran is too sublime to fill itself with synonyms for lions and other creatures,” said old Husri impatiently.

  “And it says nowhere in the Quran that we should lighten our language of so much ballast,” the minister went on. “One example will suffice. It is estimated that about sixty thousand words are used in modern physics, a hundred thousand in chemistry, two hundred thousand in medicine. In zoology, there are over a million species of animals, and in botany over three hundred and fifty thousand plant species. I would be happy if we could take over all those species from their scientific Latin names and transliterate them into Arabic, but imagine the catastrophe of having to couple all those words with synonyms. So we should have the courage to unburden our language to allow us to accommodate all these new terms, which give us entry to civilization. The
n the dictionaries will certainly be extensive, for they will also be full of life. That is why I am asking my honoured teacher Sati’ al-Husri to chair a committee addressing this delicate matter in the next ten years.” He turned to the old man. “I thank you for your courage.”

  Husri nodded, satisfied. “I will give you my committee’s new dictionary within five years,” he said proudly.

  It is said that in the summer of 1968, fifteen years after this meeting, Sati’ al-Husri looked back to this meeting on his deathbed. His boast was one of many for which life had punished him. At this time, in the fifties and sixties, he was regarded as the spiritual father of all Arab nationalists. Consequently his pupils, when they heard of his severe illness, came from all the Arab countries to take leave of their teacher and idol. They numbered twelve experienced men whose years in prison, taken together, amounted to more than a century, yet they had all now gained power in their countries – most of them through coups, but that did not disturb old Husri. Among the twelve were three prime ministers, two leaders of political parties, two ministers of defence, three heads of secret services, and two editors in chief of governmental newspapers.

  They surrounded him that day like children around their dying father, thanked him for all he had done for them, and praised his life’s work. Sati’ al-Husri smiled bitterly at all these speeches. The reform committee under his chairmanship had failed, like all he had undertaken. He was unable to remove a single word from the Arabic dictionaries. Arabic, with all its deficiencies, remained exactly the same as it had been a thousand years ago. His idea of a unified Arab nation suffered a thousand and one defeats. The Arab countries were at odds as never before, and instead of uniting were going to great pains to increase by splitting. The greatest debacle that he and his ideas encountered, however, was in the summer of 1967 when Israel inflicted a major defeat on the Arabs. That was a year before his death, and the unctuous eulogies of his pupils were more than he could take. He raised his weary hand. “No more of this hypocrisy. You are boring me. I leave you as a failure of a man, and I am not alone. Wasn’t the devastating defeat by Israel enough for you? And what did you do to prevent it? Instead of looking for mistakes, you found over seventy synonyms for the word ‘defeat’ in Arabic reference works, and invented more of them.

  “Perhaps you are simply infantile and don’t understand politics and the world order. Well, then tell me, dear children,” he said in an artificially kindly tone, “what you call this in your countries.” And raising his right buttock, he let out such a mighty fart that it roused his wife, who was sleeping in the next room.

  “Well, what are your words for it?” asked the old man, smiling.

  His pupils could not agree. Each of them gave several Arabic synonyms current in their countries for the word “fart.”

  “And you claim to be one nation?” Husri interrupted their quarrelling. “You can’t even agree about a fart,” he said, and laughed so hard that his aorta burst and he died then and there.

  When his wife entered the room, the men had already left. It is said that her first remark was, “There’s a bad smell in here.”

  But let us return to the meeting that Hamid attended, at which the minister of culture was not entirely convinced that his teacher would be able to produce the new dictionary within only five years, as he had boasted. He looked around at the company. The men were nodding thoughtfully.

  “The way in which we learn is behind the times as well. We beat our children until they are parrots learning by rote. The principle of learning by heart makes sense and is useful in the desert, but here we now have books that hold knowledge better than any memory. Repetition parrot-fashion makes children submissive and stifles their questions. They pride themselves on being able to recite whole books at the age of ten, but without having understood a line of them. Our children should be able to learn to understand through asking questions, not just learn facts by heart. Enough of that. From the next school year I want to introduce a method that I have seen used in France: the alphabet will be taught to children by means of words that make sense. The children will learn from the way we speak. It is called the whole-word method.” The minister paused, and looked searchingly at his guests. “About the alphabet. I am not of the opinion, like many would-be reformers, that the Arabic language will modernize itself if we deny our culture and write Arabic in the Roman alphabet, an approach forced on the Turks by Mustafa Kemal. Nor are such proposals either new or imaginative. The Arabs who had stayed on in Spain began writing Arabic in Roman letters out of fear and as camouflage after their final defeat in 1492 and their expulsion from the country. The script was called after them, like much in architecture that bears their name, Mudéjar.

  “But in the past the French orientalist Massignon, the Iraqi Galabi, and the Egyptian Fahmi also allowed such tasteless mockery of the language to pass, and now along comes Said Akil of Lebanon acting as if he had split the atom with a pair of pliers. His suggestion, yet again, is to introduce roman letters, and then we will be civilized.

  “No, roman letters won’t solve a single one of the problems of our language, they will only create new ones,” said the minister. “The house of the Arabic language is dignified and old. Someone must begin the work of renovation before it collapses. And do not let anyone intimidate you with the argument that the Arabic language does not change. Only dead languages never bear the impression of time.

  “I think the honour of taking the first serious step toward reform should go to Damascus. From the next school year on, all Syrian schoolchildren should learn only twenty-eight letters of the alphabet. The penultimate character LA is not a letter. It is a mistake over a thousand three hundred years old. The Prophet Muhammad was a man, and only God never errs. So there is no need for us to force our children, at the young age when they learn the alphabet, to abjure logic and regard what is false as true. There are twenty-eight letters. That is only a small correction, but it is a step in the right direction.”

  A murmur ran through the assembled company. Hamid’s heart could have taken off in flight with joy. Sati’ al-Husri smiled a knowing smile. The minister gave his audience time. As if he had thought of everything, like a theatrical director in a well-thought-out play, as he finished speaking the door of the hall opened and servants of the Ministry brought in tea and biscuits.

  All present knew what the minister was talking about. And the tea was just the thing to moisten their dry throats.

  Many legends have accumulated around that letter LA. According to the best-known anecdote, a man who had been a companion of the Prophet from the first asked how many letters God gave Adam, and the Prophet replied, “Twenty-nine.” His scholarly friend courteously corrected him, saying that he himself had found only twenty-eight letters in the Arabic language. The Prophet repeated that the answer was twenty-nine, but his friend counted them again and said no, there were only twenty-eight. At that the Prophet, flushed with anger, told the man, “God gave Adam twenty-nine Arabic letters. Seventy thousand angels bore witness to it. And the twenty-ninth letter is LA.”

  All the Prophet’s friends knew that he was wrong. LA is a word of two letters and means “no.” But not only his friends: thousands of scholars and countless other people who could read kept quiet about it for one thousand three hundred years, teaching their children an alphabet containing a superfluous and therefore false letter that is really two letters combined.

  “My aim,” the minister went on, “is to educate Syrian children, and they need not learn anything that does not lead to truth. The Prophet himself was a fine example. ‘Seek knowledge, even if it should be in China,’ he rightly said.”

  He turned to Hamid. “I expect great things of you, my favourite calligrapher Hamid Farsi. Calligraphy creates something unique. It was invented to do honour to script, the characters of the language, on paper, and yet it destroys the language by making it impossible to read. The characters of script lose their function as signs conveying ideas and turn into
purely decorative elements. I have no objection to that if the calligraphy is a frieze or arabesque to adorn walls, carpets or vases, but such flourishes are out of place in books. I particularly dislike Kufic script.”

  Hamid could have jumped for joy. He hated Kufic script himself. He was fascinated by the atmosphere that had been created among the experts, and moved when the minister beckoned to him during their break.

  “I expect the utmost support from you. You must concern yourself with the books on the teaching of language. Calligraphers are the true masters of language, so devise or reform a script that will make reading easier instead of more difficult, like the scripts used by calligraphers until now.”

  Hamid had already developed several alternatives. He soon went to see the minister, who always seemed to have time for him, and drank tea with him while they compared styles together and read the samples in lettering of different sizes. After four meetings they had agreed on the kinds of script in which school textbooks should be printed.

  The praise that Hamid won for his work was important to him as a lever with which he could set the stone of reform rolling, a reform that was to go further than the minister had told the assembled meeting.

  For nights on end he slept poorly.

  They often spoke openly to each other. When Hamid expressed his surprise that a Christian should pay such close attention to the Arabic language, which Muslims regarded as holy, the minister laughed.

  “My dear Hamid,” he said, “no language is holy. It was invented by men and women to alleviate their loneliness. So it reflects the many strata of human existence. With language you can speak of what is ugly and what is beautiful, express thoughts of murder and love, declare war and make peace. As a child I was anxious, and the slaps I got from the Arabic teacher because I insisted that there were and are only twenty-eight letters in the alphabet forced me to go looking for the facts of the matter. I wanted to defeat my teacher with my evidence, but by the time I was ready to do it, unfortunately he was dead.”