The foundation of typography

To understand the development of Arabic type design requires a brief overview of the discipline’s emergence for Latin script with the printing press.

In the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg, a German craftsman, invented the movable-type printing press, heralding a new era for the proliferation of the written word. With his invention, Gutenberg aimed to make books – specifically the Bible – available to wider masses, and also to make money for himself. Printing more books meant making more money. But to do that efficiently meant having to further standardise the Latin script.

Until the invention of the printing press, scripts came in as many forms as the hands that scribed them. Gutenberg aimed to instill a uniformity to the script to streamline the production process.

This was, of course, necessary due to how the technology functioned. Metal types were arranged in a matrix, applied with ink and pressed against paper with two plates, thus resulting in a printed page. The less varied metal type pieces were, the better. These metal types marked the advent of typography.

“Since then, there has been 700 years of development,” Apelian says, noting the slow and steady trickling of Latin script “between the pen and typeface design”.

In the context of the Arabic language, things were drastically different. Most of the development of Arabic type design has only unfurled over the past few decades. The discipline has undergone marked transformations in a significantly short span of time, especially when considering that in the West, they took place over centuries.

This is primarily due to the region’s hesitance in adopting the printing press, and the reasons for that partly lay within the sacred significance of the Arabic language.

“Writing has been a big part of the Arab, and particularly the Islamic, identity for a really long time,” Riem Ibrahim, an assistant professor at the American University of Sharjah and co-founder of Dubai-based Mobius Design Studio, says.

It is precisely this dignified nature of Arabic, however, that kept the Arab world from adopting the printing press. Arabic was sacred, being the language of the Quran, and those who worked with language had an elevated social position.

“Calligraphers or people that were able to create those scripts were extremely highly valued in the in the society generally,” Ibrahim says. “They were one of the nobles.”

A myriad of calligraphic forms emerged in the centuries after Islam was established in the seventh century. It was by no means a linear process. The foundation of the art form primarily lies in Baghdad in the Abbasid era, with Ibn Muqlah, in the early 10th century, being often hailed as the first great calligrapher. He proposed the six cursive scripts: naskh, thuluth, muhaqqaq, rayhani, tawqi, and riqaa. These would go largely unchanged for centuries. As caliphates rose and fell, and the Arabic script was adopted by the Persian and Ottoman empires, new calligraphy styles found form.

“One of the interesting facts about the evolution of calligraphy styles in the past was every new empire would have its own almost like signature calligraphy style, and that was a way to establish their status,” Ibrahim says.

However, an almost contradictory phenomenon was that even as new calligraphic styles emerged, experimentation was measured – precisely because Arabic was inextricable from the sacred. “Calligraphy was specifically linked to the Quran and the holy scripts, making it difficult for people to innovate,” Ibrahim says. This phenomenon has its echoes in the contemporary era as well.

The printing press arrives in the Middle East

As in the Latin script world, the Bible spearheaded the introduction of the printing press in the Middle East.

According to a 1982 essay by Arab specialist Fawzi Tadros, the first printing press in the region is believed to have been in Deir Qozhaya Monastery, in northern Lebanon. The monastery acquired the press in 1610 from Rome. However, it featured Syriac letters. Printing in Arabic would not begin until almost a century later.

“The first Arabic printing press was started in Syria in 1706,” Tadros writes. “But for political, economic, and other reasons, it was short-lived. In Lebanon, the first Arabic printing press was introduced in 1733 in Shuwayr by Abdallah Zakher, an acolyte and liturgical cantor in St John's Monastery [at Mount Lebanon].”

Again, the printing press was almost exclusively dedicated to printing the Bible, and its sphere of influence was limited. There were printing presses in the Ottoman Empire, for instance, but they were far and few. Most printed books that circulated in the empire were printed in Europe, even those in Turkish, Farsi, Armenian and Arabic. Generally, printed books were viewed with some negativity, as Ottoman intellectuals favoured the aesthetics and ornamentation of handwritten books.

“In fact, it was European punch cutters who created the Arabic metal type,” Apelian says. “Metal type is a matrix conceived for Latin [letters]. The Arabic script was adapted to fit this matrix.”

Printing presses began gaining traction in the region following the region’s colonisation by the West. In Egypt, it was Napoleon’s army that brought the technology to the country in 1798, albeit with propaganda in mind.

“Napoleon's printing presses in Egypt were to fulfill two important functions,” Tadros writes in his 1982 essay. “First, they disseminated French learning, culture, and ideas, while acquainting both Europeans and the natives with the long-forgotten Egyptian heritage and traditions. Secondly, the presses were used as a useful means of propaganda informing the Egyptians of Napoleon's projects and interests in an effort to win their support against Turkey.”

However, Egypt’s concentrated implementation of the technology came under the rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha, who established the Amiri Press in Cairo’s Bulaq neighborhood in 1821. The press published its first book a year later, an Arabic–Italian dictionary by Syrian priest Anton Zakhur Rafail. The press primarily focused on military books at first, but then expanded its output to include titles in literature, science and textbooks.

Nevertheless, the imported printing press was still very much a western device, and significant compromises needed to adapt the Arabic script to the metal type matrix.

“There are some features that the Arabic script has that got lost within the metal type environment,” Apelian says. “Arabic was made to fit in an environment that was foreign to the script, in terms of connectivity, the richness of the shapes, the forms, the way they need to sit together.”

Printing presses became even more prevalent in the region in the 20th century, when most of the Arab world came under colonial rule.

“It was actually introduced to these countries by the colonisers, because there was a need for kind of getting the press to the people, to communicate with the masses,” Ibrahim says. “They worked on introducing these technologies to the Arab world. They identified people and designers who could figure out ways to allow the printing press to also accommodate the Arabic language, which was extremely challenging. In many ways, this simplified the very rich calligraphic styles that we were used to,” she adds.