WRITING SIGNS

One runs across a number of things whilst one is looking for a way forward. Sometimes one finds something that sets us back, because it is the very thing we are seeking to write ourselves. This should not really make any difference to the final goal. Indeed it should be part of the research that adds to the project, rather than cause us to dismiss the project in its entirety.  In her book Writing Signs (1998 - University of California Press) Professor Irene A. Bierman writes in the Preface:

Prof. Bierman

“One visual sign found in contemporary multi-cultural cities is the public presence of different alphabets. Signs written in different alphabets appear on buildings large and small, on store fronts, on billboards flanking the road, on busses passing through the streets. In Los Angeles, along parts of Wilshire Boulevard, signs written in Persian, Korean, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, and English differentiate places, marking zones. These written signs in public places indicate the presence of a community. They are embedded in a whole range of socially constructed institutions and practices. The full potency of what these writing signs convey depends on the social position from which you view them.

For some viewers, these signs with “strange” alphabets strengthen differences. They tell them what they are not, alienating them from information, and preventing them from participating in the social networks the writing signifies. For other, literate viewers, the signs support cohesion: a group identity that has as its index a written sign in the public space. Recognizing the alphabet is, however, only the beginning of understanding how writing signs convey their meaning.

Alphabet and language have a complex relationship which is socially defined in time and place. Today in Los Angeles, signs in Latin letters can be in English or in Spanish languages. The Arabic alphabet, in which Persian is written, so commonly seen on the Westside of the city, is testimony to the large Iranian community in the city, yet many of the signs are actually in English. “Corner market,” “Hollywood café,” “Video store” are the messages the Arabic letters convey. Addressed to an audience who can read that alphabet, the use of English words suggests the social integration of the community.

Beyond questions of alphabet and language, the display of writing signs in different alphabets in the public space signals for all members of the society social practices which enable the public space to be the site for such a display of difference. As natural as writing in the public space may seem, many societies of the eastern Mediterranean over many centuries in the Middle Ages did not use writing in the public space in significant ways, but, rather, used it inside communal spaces. Indeed, at many times, in different places, even in Los Angeles, when writing did appear in the public space, it was only the dominant alphabet and language.

The role of writing signs in the visual culture of societies is of primary interest to me. How do such signs mean?—is the question I mean to pursue. For my study, I have chosen the places in which they appeared, the times in which they were seen, and the people who wrote them and the people who saw them, the whole contextual framework. The signs whose meaning I pursue appeared on the outside, on the inside, on walls, and on floors of buildings. They were put there by people with power. They were intended to be seen, some by everyone who passed, some by limited groups who sought out the place, to meet there.

I am writing about the special achievement of the Fatimids 969–1171 C.E., because they expanded the use of writing addressed to group audiences, what I call writing signs, and left a lasting legacy of writing in the public spaces in Cairo. Other rulers in Cairo followed their practice, and today their medieval writing signs are displayed alongside contemporary, less permanent ones, in the public space. Part of my purpose is to clarify how writing in Arabic succeeded in that society by being caught up in the social relationships of power and equality.

Let me emphasize that in Writing Signs, writing is used as a neutral descriptor: it indicates the presence of script, or more technically, any written markings combined according to a particular set of linguistic conventions. “Writing” carries no judgment about grammatical or orthographical correctness, or the manner of production (incised, carved, drawn with a pen) or the medium (paper, stucco, mosaic, or ceramic), nor is any comment intended on the quality of the letters or the style of the writing. Writing Signs is not a study of Arabic “calligraphy.” Calligraphy is a normative term. It involves a specific body of techniques for letter formation and script production. Writing that can be called calligraphy is hand-executed. Such “beautiful writing” requires for the writing of Arabic specially slanted pen points. Some writing addressed to group audiences in the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries studied here did have calligraphic qualities, but that fact is not the issue directly addressed in this study.

Nor is Writing Signs a paleographic or epigraphic study in the conventional sense. Both terms refer to the science of decipherment and stylistic evaluation of inscriptions. While, of course, the semantic meaning of writing as well as its style is relevant here, this study focuses on how writing made its meaning to its group audience, and for this purpose semantic meaning and style are only part of larger considerations.

In contrast to formal book-hand terms usual in the studies of calligraphy and epigraphy, the key terms in this study of writing are “officially sponsored writing,” “group audience or beholders,” and “sectarian” and “public spaces.” These terms serve to highlight the specific contexts in which those in authority within groups addressed messages in writing to a group audience, and how those writings conveyed their meaning. These terms help to discover the probable meanings the Fatimid rulers intended when they made their written messages highly visible—perhaps even permanent—by embodying them in writing on the exterior of buildings, in public spaces, and thus made them into what I call Fatimid public texts.

Writing Signs addresses the following questions: What did a Fatimid public text mean? To whom? And how did it bring its meaning to those audiences? This focus shifts the emphasis from the seeming uniqueness of Muslim practice as a whole to an exploration of the social circumstances that particularized those uses of writing and the messages it conveyed. It begins with an analysis of the writing practices of various groups in the eastern Mediterranean, arguing for the equivalent uses of writing among sectarian and ruling groups from the sixth to the tenth centuries. These two categories, sectarian and ruling, were separate yet overlapping, since while some Muslim and Christian groups did rule during this period, others were among the ruled. In a chronological sense these practices are pre-Fatimid, but in a substantive sense the equivalencies in practice must be understood as a significant classification whose distinguishing marker is that they were communal practices.

This study then proceeds to a detailed, two-part analysis of the changes in the prevailing writing practices instituted by the Fatimid ruling group. Chapter 3, The Fatimid Public Text and the Sign of Isma‘ilism, covering the period 953–1073, details the changes in the uses of writing from the reign of the Imām-Caliph al-Mu‘izz to the appointment of wazīr Badr al-Jamālī. Chapter 4, The Fatimid Public Text in a Changing Political Climate, 1073–1171, investigates the perpetuation of the older aspects of the public text, and the new changes in the public texts. The discussions in both these chapters attempt to show how Fatimid writing practices interacted in the social networks in the capital of Cairo, playing a visually significant role in the spatial hierarchies within the city. Indeed, as this study will argue, some aspects of the Fatimid public text were especially effective precisely because they addressed the whole Muslim population, sometimes creating distances, at times bridging differences, and at other times, helping to support new alliances within a population whose composition changed over the two hundred years of Fatimid rule, as did the nature of the ruling group. In the later Fatimid period, other newly introduced elements of the public text addressed the entire urban population—Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

For the purposes of this analysis, I have created a theoretical framework that enables us to understand writing addressed to a public audience as being full of meaning, conveyed in specific contextual ways—aesthetically, territorially, and referentially. This is a tool to analyze the range of meanings writing conveyed simultaneously to the people who interacted with their built environment and who participated in varying degrees in the socio-economic, political, and religious circumstances of the time.

Chapter 1, Initial Considerations, consists of a brief methodological and terminological discussion critical to explaining how the data were organized. The chapter explores the three primary functions of such written signs reflecting my conviction that form alone is not the only aspect through which written components of the visual environment related. Of course, it is true that form and content in art are not separate entities with their own histories and trajectories. But my analysis shows how the form of writing had various levels and dimensions of semantic denotation and connotation, just as the referential and territorial dimensions are shown to have complex yet specifiable and documentable manifestations. Finally, under this same rubric are found questions related to the corpus of materials and questions of defining criteria for the canon of the Fatimid public text.

Inquiries into the functions of officially sponsored writing in medieval societies in the eastern Mediterranean are still relatively few in number. The writings of Erica Dodd, Richard Ettinghausen, Oleg Grabar, Cristel Kessler, Stanley Morison, and Janine Sourdel-Thomine have helped light this not well-traveled road. I see myself walking in the same direction, in my own way.

The successful completion of this study reflects in part both the financial support from several institutions and the willingness of many colleagues in many places to discuss issues and share ideas. First I wish to thank that unique institution, The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and Dean Henry Millon and former Associate Dean Marianna Shreve Simpson, for allowing me to participate in that stimulating and challenging atmosphere. There I explored some of the ways in which writing made its meaning. Several colleagues there, especially Peter Brunette, Donald Preziosi, and Barbara Stafford offered their insights into various theoretical issues relevant here. Oleg Grabar and Irving Lavin offered much-deserved and needed criticisms and invaluable pointers. They helped me find ways to build upon my understanding of Fatimid society laid down earlier in my studies with Wilfred Madelung.

A Fulbright Civilization grant, two summer grants from the American Research Center in Egypt, as well as support from the UCLA Art Council, the Academic Senate, and the Gustav E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies enabled me to travel the length and breadth of the eastern Mediterranean to see both the specific sites discussed here and, beyond them, those which formed the corpus from which the implications are drawn. This travel was particularly critical for this study because many sites have not been published, or published only minimally, and sometimes published in piecemeal fashion. Travel enabled me not only to see new sites but to reassemble old ones so that written signs were reinserted into their visual context.

The opportunity to investigate this subject also depended on access to materials in museums and in other collections. Among those who opened institutional doors as well as windows of understanding, I wish to thank and acknowledge the help provided by Esin Atil, Ursula Dreibholz, Marilyn Jenkins, Louise Mackie, Edward Meader, Abd al-Raouf Youssef, Na‘mat Alī Abū Bakr, and the late Larry Salmon.

My colleagues at UCLA and elsewhere have provided critical hearing over the last few years. I want to thank especially Donald Preziosi, Jere Bacharach, and Michael Morony; and also Ismail Poonawala, Donald McCallum, Cecelia Klein, Yoshiaki Shimizu, James Flanagan, Samy Shavit, Jaroslav Stetkevych, Paula Sanders, May Trad, Nasser Rabbat, and Rifa‘at Abou-El-Haj.

For suggestions for the final revisions of this manuscript, I owe thanks to Shreve Simpson, David Kunzle, Susan Downey, and to numerous students who have read sections as assigned readings for medieval Islamic art history, several of whom should be mentioned: Behzad Allahyar, Shokrallah Ghoochani, Susan Sims, Patricia Kabra, Heghnar Zeitlian, and Abier Ziadeh.

Thanks are due also to the various reviewers of this manuscript, often nameless to me, who helped me sharpen my thoughts, and to Judah Bierman who reminded me to thread my thoughts and think my sentences. Lynne Withey of the University of California Press is due special thanks for her continuing support. Thanks also to Grace Wax and Sandy de Grijs who helped in various stages with typing this manuscript. And, finally, I wish to thank in particular Nasser Rabbat for the line drawings of the al-Ḥākim minarets and bastion, Nairy Hampikian for the other line drawings, and Carel Bertram for the many maps that help us walk through Cairo.

Help—even in the form of critical hearing—does not imply responsibility. All of those who in one way or another have helped me to walk my path and to avoid minefields are not responsible for those on which I stepped. This last version of the manuscript was written at UCLA, on the Pacific shore, where I often took heart from a wonderfully told tale that offered encouragement because it contained these poignant words: “We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not be that he wrote it, wrote a word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?””

 Here is a little something extra: