Djelloul Marbrook

Each year The Metropolitan Museum of Art publishes a catalog of its acquisitions. Prominent in this year’s catalog is a double page (inset) from The Nurse’s Qu’ran, a breathtaking illumination from medieval North Africa.

As I studied the reproduction it occurred to me that we are, all of us, too much immersed in our own cultures to even begin to fathom the sensibilities informing other cultures.

Here was this exquisite march of letters, each of them symbolizing sounds, sound, from right to left, a fleet of thoughts. For the first time in my life I felt the logic and cogency of reading from right to left, and I formed an inkling of how an intellect doing so might perceive the world quite differently from an intellect accustomed to reading left to right.

I noticed that these Kufic letters formed words that looked like Arab zarooks and booms, or like wind-blown tents or even dunes migrating in the wind. It seemed to me that these letters belonged to minds long accustomed to viewing vast distances, whether sea, sand or sky.

I marveled at the tactile invitation of these brown, gold and red letters on parchment. They didn’t seem like jewels remote in a case, they seemed more like beloved faces wanting to be touched.

The Arabs poured their entire creative impulse into calligraphy, because the Qu’ran proscribed figurative art and was itself the very word of God and therefore entirely worthy of a civilization’s utmost artistic attention. What the West expressed in many art forms the Arabs limited to perhaps a dozen different scripts.

It occurred to me that as the world transits from the typographical page to the ether, from paper and ink to ether-ink, the Islamic world confronts a larger issue than the West because so much of its sensibility is invested in its script. Not that Arabic can’t be rendered in e-ink, not that computers and hand-held readers can’t accommodate right to left text, but that the majesty and grandeur of text looms so large in the Arab mind.

I’m sure the medieval calligraphers of the West in their monasteries indulged the same concerns when Gutenberg’s press was introduced. Their illuminated manuscripts still instill in us faith in the destiny of the human race. But, important as they were, they did not occupy in their societies the importance of the Arab calligraphers in theirs. And that is not only because of the nature of the Qu’ran itself, but also because of the stature of the spoken word in Arab tribal society. The West still does not fully appreciate this difference.

Indeed we now live in a period when the spoken word has been so degraded by commerciality that the ghostwritten pabulum of celebrities is given more weight by publishers than the written art of visionaries. Such a society is bound to be almost unfathomable to a people, such as the Arabs, for whom the word has meant everything.

The Nurse’s Qu’ran was probably executed in Qairawan, Tunisia, between 1019 and 1020. (Here is another Qairawani jewel). The nurse of a Zirid prince endowed it to the Great Mosque of Qairawan. It was made by Ali ibn Ahmad al-Warraq. The museum puts it “among the most important examples of medieval Islamic calligraphy known today.”

Neuroscience is exploring much unknown terrain about the brain. We know the left brain is logical, sequential, rational, analytical, objective. We know it looks at parts. We know the right brain is intuitive, holistic, synergizing, subjective, and we know it looks at wholes. And we also know that our self-mythologizing, our myths about ourselves, originate in the left brain. So it seems reasonable to ask ourselves whether a civilization that reads from right to left might be significantly different in its world view than a civilization that reads from left to right.

The subject fascinates me because I was one of those born lefties who was forced to become right-handed, and occasionally I run into incidents that shed a passing light on the accommodations this must have forced on me.

As I studied the double pages of The Nurse’s Qu’ran I mused that the daily news suggests to us that we pretend to know more than we know. By we I mean the entire human race. We hold to ideologies, notions, prejudices with such ferocity that surely we must be afraid of something, afraid of a great deal in fact. Afraid of enlightenment?

I thought, perhaps because Ali ibn al-Warraq’s calligraphy is so elegant, so fluid, that we would do almost anything rather than admit to being wrong, and yet how can we possibly fulfill our highest aspirations for ourselves and yet not admit, by the hour, that we’re more often wrong than right? What is so frightening about being wrong?

And why should The Nurse’s Qu’ran have instilled in me such a meditation? I think the Sufis—perhaps Ali ibn al-Warraq, the paper maker, was one of them—would say that the student was ready and so the teacher, in a Kufic form, appeared. —DM