Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

244 t CHAPTER NINE
buildings and in more miniature form on coins. Muslims too put
inscriptions on their coins—from which figures were eventually
removed—and early on in their buildings, like the Dome of the
Rock (692), which has mosaic inscriptions in the interior. But as
time passed, the writing on buildings in particular, though it still
conveyed information, had taken on a life of its own as it was
transformed from writing to calligraphy. Extraordinarily ornate
writing runs around the portals, across the facades, or up and
down panels on the walls of most of the great Islamic monuments
of the Middle Ages. Its design is often stunningly intricate and
complex, almost unreadable in fact, in the manner of modern
graffiti. In most cases the literate viewer probably needed little help
in understanding the content since the texts were usually familiar
quranic ones. It was purely and simply the Word that was being
magnified by artistic enhancement.
There is little parallel among the equally aniconic Jews. From
the tenth century onward Jews produced artistically illuminated
manuscripts in Muslim Egypt, though without figurative representations.
But two centuries later, when Jewish manuscript illumination
began in Christian Europe, representations of sacred or ceremonial
objects were portrayed, and later, in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, figures of rabbis and others began to appear.
But there is no exaltation of Hebrew into the monumental public
calligraphy of Arabic. It is not difficult to understand why. Islam
was official: it controlled the public life of the Middle East and
what was permissible in it; Jews lived under the dhimma, which
would have made the public display of Hebrew not only unlikely
but dangerous.