In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Read in the name of your Lord Who created. Read and your Lord is Most Honourable, who taught to write with the pen, taught man what he knew not.
Two texts from the Middle East, St John’s Gospel and the Holy Qur’an both proclaim the primacy and authority of words. The Evangelist’s Word is the eternal creativity of God which, in Jesus, became flesh: the Word Incarnate. In the passage from the Qur’an — the first of the Prophet Mohammed’s revelations — God announces his intention to use the written word to spread truth for all to read and learn: the Word Inscribed.
In Europe, we long ago divided the thinking word from the pleasing image. But in the Middle East, the word has remained something to behold, and the pleasure of well-known words can also be a delight for the eye — a favourite quotation, sacred or profane, can be played with on paper, and in the mind can be contemplated in every sense (see illustration).
The centuries-old link between the Islamic tradition and the written word can be seen in the eloquently simple pottery inkwell from Morocco in the form of a mosque. It is now in the Sainsbury African galleries of the British Museum (see illustration).
Two floors above it, a new exhibition, Word into Art: artists of the modern Middle East (until 3 September), explores the latest manifestations of this Middle Eastern phenomenon. Based on the Museum’s collection of modern Middle Eastern art, put together over the past 25 years, it focuses on the expressive transformation of Arabic script into free-flowing form, be it in a contemporary take on traditional calligraphy or the wall-art of street politics.
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