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Arab Calligraphy & Grafitti

10 de out.
4 min de leitura

Atualizado: há 2 horas

Arabic-Islamic calligraphy has inhabited moodboards and Pinterest folders for some time now, both for its undeniable graphic quality and for the public appeal that Arab culture has gained with the conflicts involving Palestine and Iran. But when looking at such a different alphabet, it is easy to create a purely aesthetic admiration empty of context. From this idea, this post is a research piece that builds a contextual bridge between Arabic calligraphy and typographic graffiti, a popular art that inhabits our daily life and shares aesthetic and historical similarities. To outline this panorama, it is necessary to go back to the beginning.


The complexity and variety of the Arabic-Islamic alphabet are a consequence of aniconism, which is the absence of icons (which is not the same as iconoclasm, which refers to the destruction of icons). Prohibiting the icon is prohibiting the visual representation of living beings. This practice exists in Islam, with the intention that God and holy figures not be worshipped through their image, but through their message. By prohibiting representation, Islamic visual language becomes practically a graphic design class: it works with typography, color, and geometry, which blend into an architectural way of thinking. The typefaces are varied, expanded, and distorted to fit the context and intention of the books and buildings where they are applied.


Among the calligraphic styles, Naskh is the most common, used in literacy. The word naskh means “to copy” or “to transcribe,” to pass a text to another. What matters in this style is its fluidity and continuity, ideal for teaching and study. Kufic, meanwhile, has many variations, but in general they are geometric, linked to mathematics and astronomy, evoking an eternal and stable cosmos. It is used in stone mosaics in architecture and also in the first Qurans, which sought to avoid ambiguities and create a solid text. Thuluth is taller, curvilinear, and refined, and seeks to convey a majestic presence; for this reason it is widely used on the walls of palaces, mosques, and minarets (towers). Diwani is maximum complexity: it is dense, curved, and excessive. The intention is to be secret and not legible. It was created in the Ottoman courts and used in government documents. It does not speak; it whispers about mystery and about power.


Within graffiti, the tag is usually the first step for those entering and also the first style to emerge, because it is the artist’s own signature which, like a signature on a document, is quick and stylized, but above all marks possession, even if symbolic. The throw-up is considered the evolution of the tag. But to be bigger and still quick, it is raw and “no frills,” with simple filling and, sometimes, flawed, hence the name throw-up, which means “vomit.” Striking and easy to do in quantity, it is used by those who want to mark their presence. Pixo is a language of protest: it does not ask permission, it is called a “scream in concrete.” They are more vertical and straight letters, which makes it easier to paint with rollers on tall buildings. It has a rune-like aspect, because it is inspired by old punk and heavy metal covers, which used Anglo-Saxon runes. There is also the most impactful style, made to be direct and gigantic, with more square and modular letters and high legibility, since it usually appears in places of movement, such as train tracks and avenues.


One element of the Quran traversed by calligraphy is the 99 names of God. It is a way of saying that God is infinite: he does not even have a name that reduces him to a single thing. The number is 99, and not 100, to reinforce the idea of incompleteness—one will never know everything about him. The names are characteristics, such as “The Just” and “The Wise,” and it is these 99 names that usually illustrate walls and manuscripts. That is, a mosque wall can be described as a sacred version of a wall full of tags, which are artists’ signatures that also often use aliases, whether for personal safety or for mystery.


Arabic writing also appears in a central episode of Brazilian history: the Malê Revolt, the largest slave rebellion in the country. Malê means “Muslim” in Yoruba and, in Salvador, among enslaved Africans there was a group of Muslims who taught other slaves to read and write in Arabic, including non-Islamic ones, since the objective was political, not religious. The teaching of the language happened through writing passages from the Quran that spoke about equality among men and religious freedom. The revolt was defeated, but not without frightening the rulers because of its organization: about 600 people participated, using Arabic as a secret language to communicate in code. There are records of countless papers seized after the revolt with writings in Arabic.


Graffiti too, within cultural and artistic debates, faces stigmas because of its aspect of coded writing, which in its lack of legibility does not want to be understood, and therefore is not open to dialogue. The mixture of coded writing that is done shamelessly in places of broad visibility in the landscape speaks of affirming one’s own existence within an urban order that projects its invisibility. It is a stylized aniconism, because being read is not the opposite of being seen: it is equivalent.





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