I would like to talk about an aspect of Turkish and Persian culture, calligraphy. While calligraphy in the region is often referred to as Arabic calligraphy, disregarding the language which it writes and focusing on the script itself, I believe Persian has taken that which was rightfully called Arabic and created something new. If we can speak of a Persian calligraphy, then owing to cultural blending, much of Turkish calligraphy is likewise Persian—even more so than it is Arabic.
The first point that would be mentioned is that the Turkish language is written in a script only marginally related to that which is used to write Persian. Practically, these are separate and unique scripts. However, a hundred year ago, this was not the case. Turkish was written in what is called the Arabic alphabet.
While it was the Arabs who first formed the letters of the Arabic alphabet, it was the Persians who transformed the script into something an outsider would consider very different. The great development the Persian speakers made is called nastaliq. The script is said to have been designed to meet the needs of the Persian language.
What makes nastaliq script different form the Arabic scripts used outside of the Persianate world is the almost complete lack of angularity. Upon one’s first look at the script, one might think it to have been done with a brush. However, it is done with a reed qalem. What stands out even more is that letters are formed much differently than they are in Nasq or similar scripts. It requires experience and training for someone unfamiliar with the script to identify all the letters on the page. Nastaliq also does not follow the proportional system used in writing nasq-like scripts. Instead, it takes on more organic and seemingly free proportions.
If I were to compare these mentioned calligraphy styles with those used in cultures using the Latin alphabet, I would liken nasq to a highly legible gothic/blackletter and nataliq with copperplate. This said, Imagine if all the books at the bookstore had copperplate on the cover and blackletter inside. This is how Persian printing typically works. Perhaps this is because the script is hard to scale down to the size needed for long books. Perhaps this has also been due to the organic and undulating nature of the script which makes it difficult to level into a euro-centric ideal of print layouts.
Moving away from written culture into the culture around writing, we can see the purpose of the script. The script is indeed more legible than most’s handwriting. While there are expert calligraphers in the Islamic world, there are also many amateurs. Having spoken to a friend of mine who is Afghani, I understood that one uses nastaliq for clarity and formality. When one needs to be understood and the option to write clearly (which was, before print, the only option) was calligraphy, it required you to be familiar with a script. In the Persianate world, this script was more often than not nastaliq.
My Afghani friend, who is an Afghani chief, is also an amateur poet in Dari. After he asked me about my attempts at calligraphy, he demonstrated his unpracticed version of nastaliq. While I am not familiar with writing or reading of the script as of yet, I gave him a set of pens that I made and told him to modify them as needed. I also gave him an inkwell with ink special to Arabic calligraphy and containing a ball of silk threads.
He told me about the relationship between calligraphy and poetry and Islam. Poets write their works by hand in days before print and now. This would be the original. Think of the difference in value (monetary and otherwise) between prints of art and the art itself. The original is so much more important. However, even today, the originals require having been written by hand to have this value. Further, calligraphy in Islamic societies has been seen as a holy art. Even in Turkey today this art is practiced, albeit not in Turkish. A bit of this sacredness seems to have been transferred to poetry, which is another valued component of most Islamic cultures.
I understood my friend to say that his poetry was about his relation to the world and god and promoting an ideal of renunciation. My first thought when I head this was that it was sufi-stic. When I asked him, he confirmed that indeed his poetry was in this tradition. Sufis, Islamic mystics with an often pan-theistic view of god, are famous and infamous. Wahabis call them heretics or even non-Muslims, others, non-Muslims also, read them with reverence. Rumi is probably the best known. Omar Xayyam is the sufi-poet I want to read.
A few days after talking with my Afghani sufi-poet-chef friend, the Ottoman Imperial Archives Facebook page posted a photograph of a poem by Sultan Suleyman Kanuni. It was in rough nastaliq style which he had made with his own hand. The contents of the poem are beyond me, but it would be a safe guess that they had something to do with Islam. I say it would be a safe guess because the Ottomans identified with the Persianate tradition of poety and often used the nastaliq script. If the container is the same, then the contents could also be so.
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