O
ne of the world’s most remarkable newspapers is published from a tiny office on a back street in Chennai, in eastern India. The Musalman — that is, The Muslim — is a four-page Urdu paper that covers news, sports, and local events, and ever since it was founded in 1927, it has been entirely written, every day, by hand.
Three full-time katim, or calligraphers, work in an 800-square-foot room, writing in the traditional nastaliq style using the qalam, or reed pen. I’ve seen them only on video, but it’s an astonishing, vertiginous sight — especially for someone who has worked in a newsroom in the United States — watching such careful, concentrated lettering in a business founded on haste, on getting the story, and getting it written and out on the streets before your competitor.
Why on earth would you want to handwrite a newspaper? Wouldn’t using a digital keyboard be quicker, cheaper, easier to edit, easier to print from — and, once printed, easier to read?
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And the question of legibility masks other issues. If you handwrite a newspaper, won’t it look . . . unsophisticated? Unprofessional? Old-fashioned?
Let’s start with the pen. The qalam may be more than 3,000 years old. It is so central to Arabic calligraphy that different calligraphers prefer reeds from different regions. The qalam is specifically revered as a symbol of wisdom and education in the Qur’an. It’s not just a writing instrument; it’s an instrument of the divine word.
As with all calligraphies, writing implement and writing style, go (ahem) hand in hand.
The nastaliq calligraphy style is central to the Arabic aesthetic, blurring the (Western) line between writing and art. It doesn’t have the consistency we expect of printing, or even of well-schooled handwriting. It has strong, expressive ascenders and descenders running below, above, and through a cosmos of diacritics. Expressive, defying economic use of page space, defying time itself — to the modern eye, it looks old.
Nastaliq has a right to look ancient. One of the world’s great calligraphies, emerging more than 600 years ago, nastaliq is one of the main styles used to write the Perso-Arabic script, as well as Classical Persian, Kashmiri, Punjabi, and (as with The Musalman) Urdu in a geographic sweep from Iran throughout South Asia, for written poetry and as a form of art in itself. In the face of such a pedigree, questions of cost and legibility start to seem — well, petty. Shallow.
The choice of nastaliq is dictated by those close cousins, religion and tradition.
Christianity has been associated with printing for so long it’s harder for those of us brought up in the Christian tradition to grasp the importance of the handwritten word than it is for, say, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims. All four are religions of the book, but most mainstream Christians have not encountered their religion through devoted, sacred calligraphy for centuries.
To Muslims, on the other hand, it’s commonly believed that disrespect of calligraphy as a tradition reveals a person as being uneducated and unwise. Historically, the physical presence of the written letters of the Qur’an functioned the way icons did to the Byzantines, as a blessing and protection.
In Christian terms, the phrase “sacred text” generally refers to the content; in other faiths, it refers to both the content and the writing. For many Muslims, the written Arabic word is considered sacred, and long after the advent of printing (even after the development of Arabic typefaces), it was considered sacrilegious to reproduce it mechanically. In that sense, The Musalman is perhaps the last survivor of another tradition — the traditional belief that even in such a secular arena as the news, writing itself is a vehicle of spirit.
Not only is the act of writing an act of devotion that blurs any distinctions between art, craft, and faith, but the act of reading is likewise an act of devotion. To read, say, the Indian cricket scores in a print newspaper and to read them handwritten in The Musalman are two different acts.
The phrase “community newspaper” takes on new levels of meaning — especially for minority communities. About ten percent of Chennai’s population is Muslim, but only about a fifth of them speak Urdu. What does it mean to be a Muslim in India, or a Cherokee in the United States, or an Amazigh in Algeria? What keeps a people together? What gives them a sense of tradition, of value, of self-respect, especially when so many members of minority communities are forced to find work abroad?
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In part, it may be such traditional practices as art, music, clothing, ceremonies. It may be the ancestral language. Especially within a diaspora, it may be the traditional script. What interests me especially about The Musalman is that, in addition to these powerful forces, the newspaper’s survival highlights the vitality and importance of writing by hand.
“Calligraphy is the heart of The Musalman,” says Syed Arifullah, the paper’s editor and publisher. “If you remove the heart, there will be nothing there.”
And yet it’s a sign of the times that even in the Muslim world, nastaliq is yielding ground to a simpler, clearer style called naskh, common in the Middle East, which is much simpler to compose, uses a simpler orthography that facilitates reading, and provides clearer delineation of the grammar.
More than a decade ago, the author Ali Eteraz lamented the decline of nastaliq in an article in Medium, pointing out, “BBC-Urdu and Urdu Voice of America both use naskh. . . . In fact, naskh is so dominant now, that when the appropriately named D.E.I.T.Y. — The Department of Electronics and Information Technology of the Government of India — released an Urdu keyboard app for Windows and Android, they released 12 naskh fonts and only one nastaliq font.”
What interests me about this example is the nature of writing itself, and its future. The calligraphy in The Musalman, like all calligraphies, suggests that the act of writing by hand (and its sister act, the act of reading handwriting), incorporates far more than the mere transmission of information.
Pakistani-American poet Shadab Zeest Hashmi (quoted by Eteraz) describes the experience of learning to write nastaliq: “I was learning to extend myself, to make imprints of my inner life onto the outer reality of the page. Words had created visual fields for me — allowing endless possibilities for expressing meaning.”
Before we discard handwriting, we need to understand every dimension of what we are giving up.
TIM BROOKES is the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project, which aims to create a list of the world’s writing systems, identifying every script currently in use and assessing its degree of health or vulnerability.
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