As of the Greek word for “good-looking writing,” calligraphy is considered the highest art form in Islam, for more than a few reasons. For one, Muslims consider that Allah used the Arabic language to recite the Qur’an to Muhammad, plus for that reason, it has a spiritual meaning for Muslims. Too, using words as artistry avoided the problem of by pictorial images.

Examples of the Naskh, Thuluth, Muhaqqaq, Nastaliq, and Riq'a scripts in Arabic calligraphy Courtesy of Sakkal Design www.sakkal.com

Whereas decorative writing every one other than disappeared in Europe by the advent of the printing press, the Islamic world retained it as an art shape long after the necessity of writing longhand is removed by modern technology. Calligraphy decorated architecture, decorative arts, coins, jewellery, textiles, weapons, gear, paintings, plus manuscripts.

Though the Arabic language plus script existed before Islam, the spread of the faith also facilitated the spread of the language throughout the new Muslim lands. Arabic became an essential component of Islamic culture, more often than not because it is the language of the Qur’an. Caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705) decreed so as to Arabic should be the administrative language of the territory. There were many Muslim regions, of course, in which Arabic be not the native language. Persian is the major non-Arabic language verbal in the Islamic world, plus in the 7th century it had it’s possess script.

As Islam spread through the areas where Persian and other languages were spoken, however, the Arabic script was adopted. The Persian language, also known as Farsi, added four letters to the Arabic script to represent sound that existed in Persian, other than not in Arabic.

The Turks later also added another letter to render a distinctly Turkish noise, although contemporary Turkish no longer uses the Arabic script. The Arabic script is still used to write the Kazakh, Uzbek, and Tajik languages in Central Asia, as healthy as Urdu in present-day Pakistan. It is also used at one point, though no longer, to mark Malay, Swahili, and several North African languages. Arabic, belonging to the Semitic language group, has 28 letters. There are merely 17 different forms, however, so dot or strokes above or underneath the forms are used to indicate different letters. For calligraphic purposes, these extra markings put in to the beauty and artistic appeal of Arabic.

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