God Does Not Write With Latin Letters

by

Nicki Leone

“God is not interested in the Latin alphabet,” says Rikkat Kunt, the narrator in The Calligraphers’ Night by the French-Lebanese author Yasmine Ghata. “His dense breath cannot skim across those squat, separate letters.”

I wish someone had explained this to me when I was trying to learn Arabic in college.

In my first week of college I was scheduled, along with a thousand other freshman, for a set of predetermined required courses and asked to choose my major. I had no idea. An advisor had been assigned to each of us and mine, in my designated thirty minutes, asked me what I liked. I shrugged. I liked almost everything. He took a look at my application, saw that I had tested out of most of my English, math, and history requirements, and that somewhere on that paper had mentioned I liked reading about the Middle East. Actually, I liked reading Lawrence Durrell, but he still seized on this with all the decisiveness of a man who knows he has only ten minutes until his next student appointment. I had walked into that meeting with no real idea of what I would do with my life. I walked out, a Russian Studies major (the advisor’s own department) with a minor in Middle Eastern Studies. Imagine if I had written that I liked to play chess? Or watch the news? I may well have ended up in Political Science or even—one shudders to think—economics.

As it was, I was happy enough. Then, as now, the Middle East was much in the news and the small department devoted to its consideration was vibrant as academics attempted to follow and understand the disintegration of Lebanon from a Middle Eastern Riveria into a rubble-strewn war zone, or the rising power of Palestinian nationalist terrorist groups and Islamic fundamentalist movements. Being academics, they tended to start at the source, the origin of things, which meant the Prophet Mohammed. So my courses were divided between modern (and now, I realize, often flawed) analyses of Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and historical surveys of the rise of Islam, of the waxing and waning powers of Caliphates, the rise and then long, painful fall of the Ottoman Empire. It was all very colorful, like an adventure story, and I had always loved my Arabian Nights.

One of the requirements of the minor was to study a Middle Eastern language, and I chose Arabic, once again, mostly opportunistically. It just so happened that the classes were held at another campus just across the street from my new morning waitressing job. So for four years I spent the hours from  5:00 am to 8:00 am serving up cups of weak coffee and plates of greasy fried eggs and dry toast to  bleary students and hungover working stiffs, and from 8:00 am to 10:00 was seated at a wide folding table, scratched and pitted and grafittied from years of student use, attempting to write out and decipher a series of Suras (chapters in the Koran), Arabic fairy tales, Lebanese short stories and articles from Al-Ahram (the Cairo newspaper).

I do not have a talent for languages, so I wasn’t very good at it. My logical, left-brain nature regarded my lessons as a kind of puzzle to be solved or code to be broken, as if the symbols of an unfamiliar alphabet could be made to simply substitute for the letters in my own. I thought, for example that the Arabic “ﻕ” (qāf) somehow “equaled” the Latin letter “q.” It would be years before I would learn better. Before it would dawn on me (a woefully slow student) that translation was not a practice to be done letter by letter, or even word by word, but thought by thought and meaning by meaning. I can still, with the help of a very battered Arabic dictionary (the same one I had in college now, held together with duct tape) make my way through Al-Ahram, but it is a slow and painful process.

But if I don’t have a talent for languages, I do have a talent for drawing, and this more than anything else saw me through my lessons. I was comfortable with the fluid movements of our pencils and pens, not at all phased by the right-to-left direction of the lines, or the way the Arabic letters changed shape depending on where they were placed in a word. The way each letter ran into the next felt more like drawing than writing, and I especially loved doing the final letters in a word, because they tended to swirl and trail like vines growing over the edges of their pots.

We were all naturally very, very careful to be extra neat with our homework. It was hard enough to have to read in an unfamiliar alphabet, much less a badly or carelessly written one.  So I spent hours on my assignments, carefully copying phrases, poems and Islamic prayers as beautifully and perfectly as possible. And that sense of focus and absorption—that, too, was like drawing. It bled into other parts of my life. My handwriting became incredibly neat, and stayed that way for years.

That pleasurable feeling of absorption in creating something beautiful came back to me in a rush as I read Ghata’s The Calligraphers’ Night. It is a fictionalized account of the life of a real woman, Rikkat Kunt, a famous Turkish calligrapher known for her skill in halkâri (illumination in gold leaf) who also happened to be the author’s grandmother. She began as I had begun, with a simple delight in the movement of the pen (or, in her case, the qalam, a reed pen like a quill): “I remember that when I was a girl I enjoyed tracing the interwoven pattern of the Sultan’s monogram together with his patronymic and the epithet ‘ever-victorious.’ . . . Copying the Sultan’s tughra* over and over was my favorite pastime; my father, who worried about forgeries, warned me off this practice in spite of the precision of my copies that could deceive the most expert eye.”

* A tughra is a calligraphic seal or signature of the Ottoman Sultan, and used in all official documents.

The girl persists, however, and her father eventually gives in and hires a drawing teacher for her. It is the first instance of what will be a lifetime pattern for Rikkat. Her continual and determined retreat into a pastime that the men in her life do not understand or quite approve, but to which they all eventually give way.  Even her husbands—she fails at two marriages—are unable to shake her commitment to this art. Even her country, which at the time had, in an attempt to modernize, banned the Arabic alphabet and the practice of Islamic calligraphy, replacing it with a Latinized alphabet instead does not deter her. Much of Rikkat’s “apprenticeship” as a calligrapher came from duties she had taking care of the medersa (school) given to the last of the old Islamic calligraphers who had no place left in the new Turkey. It was a dingy place, a “hospice for calligraphers.” Rikkat brought them food and cleaned their work spaces, ignored their embittered derision and practiced their exercises. One in particular noticed her work, and when he committed suicide, bequeathed his writing instruments, tools and ink to her.

Rikkat’s rebellion is always quiet, but always successful. “I started to devote myself to exercises in calligraphy to console my hand for having been offered too hastily in marriage” she says, “Shifting letters about, making the lines deviate and stand out—this was my way of protesting against this marriage.” Her first marriage becomes almost silent as she orients her days in such a way to avoid her husband’s company. If it weren’t for her son, her life would be almost completely internal. In fact she is so successful at both avoiding her husband and at practicing her calligraphy that when it is discovered she has entered a nationally sponsored competition (the government, realizing it had been too hasty in banning Arabic calligraphy, was looking for new talent), her family is taken completely by surprise. Her husband is furious and moves the family away, so it will be another year before Rikkat discovers that she had won the competition, and with it a place at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul.

So Rikkat is something of a miracle—a woman who practiced a profession usually the domain of men, who pursued it at a time when the language itself was banned from use, and who succeeded and gained an international reputation, influencing the art in ways that are still in evidence today. Even a cursory glance at contemporary practicing calligraphers often finds the name of Rikkat Kunt listed among their credentials. Her pupils now teach in museums that hold, proudly, exhibitions of her work.

But all that is outside the story told in The Calligraphers’ Night. It remains a beautiful account of one woman’s complicated path to follow what was quite obviously a calling—and I use the word almost in its religious sense. It is the story of the creation of the woman, Rikkat, and the calligrapher, Rikkat Kunt, and the two are intertwined as elaborately as the vines and flowers that decorate the subject’s own work.  The woman’s story is beautiful and compelling, of course. It is filled with a desire for love and the experience of loss, with men who disappoint her, children who are taken away from her and reconciled only years later, a society that does not regard her wishes or dreams as important.

But it is the calligrapher’s story—the artist’s story—that arrested me, and brought those early college days of struggling to write a passable copy of bismi-llāhi ar-raḥmāni ar-raḥīmi (“In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate”) vividly before me.  Every step in the process of writing becomes a point for meditation and reflection. Rikkat talks of her old teachers with the surety that their ghosts are still in the room, guiding her (night is a time for the visitation of spirits).  She handles her instruments as though they were independent beings who may or may not decide she is worthy to touch them. She speaks often of her compositions as though they arrived through her hand, guided or gifted by the ghosts of calligraphers long dead. And what artist is not always reaching for, longing for, this moment of total submission to the work? When the brush or the pen or instrument seems to act on its own, fed directly from some creative spirit and bypassing conscious thought altogether? “I had to struggle like mad to hold back their need to make up for the wasted years,” remembers Rikkat on the day when she first used the tools left to her by the old master. “An impoverished concerto played itself out before my eyes: the qalam was a flute in my fingers, its support tried out its skills as an archer, and the paper became a musical score for the needs of all.”

Calligraphy, it turns out, is more like painting than writing. The act of preparing the paper, and mixing the ink (especially the coveted gold leaf used by illuminators to decorate the title pages of the Suras and other religious texts), of sharpening the qalam and preparing the work surface—all this is part of the final composition. Even the moment when the final stroke has finished, the pen lifted away and the paper laid aside to dry—even this is a step with significance. “Calligraphers never blow on the ink,” admonishes Rikkat, “accelerating this drying process is the same as expelling the divine presence.”

So this is why God is not interested in the Latin alphabet. Latin letters mean nothing until they are put into words. And then, they are only words. Information. “Content.” I had thought that calligraphy was the art of writing words beautifully. It is not. It is an act of prayer.

I am not a believer, so I am perhaps forever doomed to read and write Arabic haltingly, painfully. But like the people looking at Rikkat Kunt’s work in a museum exhibition, I can at least, thanks to The Calligraphers’ Night, feel the echoes of greater things in the ornate compositions in front of me. And hear, for the first time, something of the power being evoked when the bismillah is recited:  bismi-llāhi ar-raḥmāni ar-raḥīmi (In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate)