All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  In design school in London, Rana told me as the waitress brought us our drinks, she had thought she could whip up a good Arabic font set in a day. At a glance, the Arabic alphabet doesn’t seem too hard to render in type. The twenty-eight letters are made up of eighteen basic shapes. You could knock out ba (ب), ta (ت), and tha (ث) in practically one stroke, plus most of noon (ن). And no capital letters—that was a bonus.

  She took a sip of her ale and sighed. “But then it got complicated.”

  The alphabet’s complexity developed over centuries. The first Arabic writing, in the early fourth century, was a simple adaptation of the Aramaic alphabet, via Nabataean. It didn’t have enough letters to reflect all the tricky Arabic consonants, so it used the same shape for similar sounds—there was no distinction between s and sh, for instance. The letters were stiff and spidery, made for carving in rock.

  Up through the dawn of the Islamic era, in the early seventh century, Arab culture was primarily oral, so imprecision in the alphabet wasn’t a big deal. The written word was more a memory aid than a direct communication tool. When you read, you understood that the word was shi’r (poetry), not si’r (price), because you already knew it all by heart, or because you knew Arabic well enough to understand that, in this context, you were reading about verse, not money.

  The first wave of Islamic expansion brought new Arabic speakers (and readers) into a growing empire. These clueless foreigners did not necessarily understand the context, so they could easily misread shi’r as si’r, for example, and think the Quran said, “We have not taught the Prophet the price.” This could lead to a whole misinterpretation about God disliking money, perhaps, when the verse actually read, “We have not taught the Prophet poetry,” and was understood as a comment on the Quran’s linguistic style.

  So in the late seventh century, Abu al-Aswad ad-Du’ali, the first persnickety grammarian in a long chain, devised a system of dots to distinguish ambiguous letters and indicate short vowels. Later writers refined the system, keeping ad-Du’ali’s dots on the letters and developing the vowel marks used today. Ad-Du’ali’s three dots still distinguish poetry—شعر—from price—سعر. Additionally, the vowel marks ensure that poetry—shi’r, or شِعْر, with full vowels—is not mistaken for hair—sha’r, شَعْر. These innovations turned a loosey-goosey, you-get-the-idea system into one in which every possible Arabic sound was represented. That was great for the goof-prone newcomers to the language, but down the road, for typographers like Rana, all these extra marks would mean more work.

  Meanwhile, the shapes of the letters were developing too. In the mid-eighth century, the Arabs learned how to make paper, probably from Chinese prisoners taken in Central Asia. In 794, the first paper mill was built in Baghdad and began churning out reams (from the Arabic rizma, bundle) of the stuff. A few decades later, the caliph al-Ma’moun founded the translators’ institute Beit al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom. Copyists, scholars, and calligraphers sharpened their reed pens and went to work on paper’s inviting, smooth surface.

  Until then, the dominant style of formal writing, called Kufic, was spare and angular, still showing its roots in rock inscriptions. Parchment had enabled some flourishes, especially in copies of the Quran, but paper was an even more versatile medium. In the early tenth century, with the House of Wisdom in full swing translating Greek scientific treatises and the Islamic empire still expanding, the grand vizier Ibn Muqla set down the first rules of proportion for calligraphy. His naskh (copying) script was an elegant, legible handwriting that was suitable for both religious and secular material.

  Because standardization across a polyglot empire and consistency of the Quran were both critical, any substantial changes in writing were not organic, but official. Each innovation was debated by the leading clerics and the caliph, then a decision was made, decreed, and disseminated. This charged context made calligraphy high-stakes work. In the course of palace intrigue, Ibn Muqla’s tongue was cut out and his hand cut off. He strapped a reed pen to his stump and carried on.

  In the Siege of Baghdad in 1258, while the Mongols sacked the city, the calligrapher Yaqut al-Must’asimi is said to have holed up in a tower, bent on refining the rules for naskh script. While he toiled in seclusion, Hulagu Khan’s troops tossed the contents of the House of Wisdom, by then the world’s largest collection of books, into the Tigris; according to legend, the river ran red with blood, then black with ink. (Fortunately many books were hidden before the battle; the Greek translations eventually made their way to European libraries.) Al-Must’asimi survived, and his perfected naskh was so fine, clear, and well proportioned that it became the default for all copies of the Quran. It also formed the basis of most modern typefaces.

  Despite al-Must’asimi’s focused efforts in Baghdad, naskh script could not be instantly transformed into a typeface. The crucial difference between calligraphy and type is both physical and philosophical. “Good Arabic script,” Rana told me in the communist bar, “isn’t necessarily all on one baseline.”

  Elegantly written Arabic can dip, swoop, cascade, or curl into the shape of a bird or a flower; words become decorative art, on a page in a manuscript, on a wall of a building, or in a standalone inscription. Even simple handwriting can flow diagonally, each letter set a little lower than the one before it. How to render all that grace and flexibility in type? The mechanics of printing demand a baseline, one place to set all the letters.

  The other difficulty is the cursive nature of Arabic writing—how each letter is linked to the next. Blocky, standalone Latin letters have only uppercase and lowercase. In Arabic, a letter can have up to four forms, depending on where it sits in a word.

  For example, at the beginning, on the right side, the letter ʼayn looks a bit like an English c, an open mouth:

  عين

  In the middle of a word—say, ta’ima, which means to taste or savor—that mouth closes up into an angular loop, a little polyp:

  طعم

  At the end of a word—such as isba’ (finger)—the loop grows a graceful tail:

  إصبع

  Standing alone, as at the end of dhira’, the word for arm, the ʼayn opens its mouth again:

  ذراع

  Perhaps because of all these nuances, as well as the reverence given to the calligrapher’s art, Arabic typography was still a small field, even in the digital era. Word-processing software came loaded with Latin font fripperies like Britannic Bold, Castellar, and Comic Sans, but only a dozen or so Arabic options. Signage in the Arab world was not always legible, books could be hard on the eyes, and, my particular peeve, movie subtitles could be too cramped to read quickly.

  When I had seen creative Arabic type design, though, I noticed that much of it came from Beirut. There was a historic reason for this, Rana explained. The first printing press in the Arab world was imported from England to a Maronite monastery on Mount Lebanon in 1585 (Christians were exempt from an Ottoman ban on printed books); it used Syriac letters. In 1734, some of the region’s first printed matter in Arabic letters was produced in the same area.

  Further, Rana said, calligraphy had traditionally been the domain of Muslims—the art of it was intimately linked with copying the Quran. Because monks had brought in the printing presses, type design fell to Christians. “Not that I think that’s the way it should be,” she said. “Calligraphy is my heritage too.” The communist bar’s lights had dimmed a bit for the evening, and the music grew louder. Rana’s voice carried over the background Afropop. It was refreshing to hear someone speak so evenhandedly about yet another sectarian division.

  Rana, like Hamdi in Egypt and many other Arabs I had met, had hated her childhood Arabic classes. She was not taught good handwriting, she made spelling mistakes, and she never felt comfortable reading. “When they asked for volunteers to read passages from the Bible, I hid behind the other students,” she recalled with a grimace. “Mayb
e I was dyslexic and my parents just didn’t know.”

  In fact, it was her own trouble with reading that later inspired her type designs. For her first project, she had interviewed children learning Arabic as a second language. They all complained that it was hard to distinguish the letters—the same problem she’d had as a kid. Out of this came a design for a stylized cursive for use in children’s books.

  Then Rana moved on to the general-use font she named Mirsaal, from the root rasila, which means to flow and communicate. In Mirsaal, each letter has only one form, like in the Latin alphabet, but it has a little tail on either side, so it can be joined to its neighbor or, if the designer prefers, stand alone. In standalone mode, Rana said, she found the letters far easier to distinguish. To my non-native eye, the Mirsaal alphabet took getting used to, but a whole paragraph in Mirsaal type looked much less intimidating than a typical Arabic newspaper column, perhaps because Mirsaal has more of the breathing room around the letters that I was accustomed to in Latin type.

  Rana was far from the first to try to revamp the Arabic alphabet. In the 1930s, the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo created a few additional letters to represent foreign-to-Arabic sounds such as p and v, although they never became standard on Arabic keyboards. In the 1950s, a Lebanese American named Nasri Khattar, a trained calligrapher, developed a set of all standalone letters. It was never adopted, but it remained an inspiration for many future type designers, including Rana.

  The history of type design was littered with even more outlandish reform attempts, all failed. These included Arabic alphabets built out of the shapes of Latin letters (î for ث, for instance); new letters to represent short vowels; a new letter to represent nunnation (tanween), the indefinite case ending; symmetrical letters that could be read from the left or the right; and a “condensed alphabet” with fewer shapes. This last innovation was promoted by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, then abandoned; its developer went into exile in Paris.

  Since Rana had left school, she barely used Arabic in her professional life. “Sometimes I find it difficult to remember the alphabet!” she said. Her Lebanese colleagues often spoke English together, and the design classes she taught were almost entirely in English too, because the students would later use it for work. “Basically, everything encourages you to use another language,” she said with real frustration.

  In this respect, Lebanese were wrestling with the same problems that Emiratis and Qataris were. Above a certain level of education, in a certain globalized realm, Arabic of any kind—Fusha or colloquial—was no longer relevant. Many Lebanese in the diaspora had come back after the war, not all speaking Arabic fluently, and prosperity brought guest workers from Ethiopia and Bangladesh. Beirut was one-tenth the size of Cairo, but it was a visibly more mixed city, and an audibly more polyglot one.

  No wonder the tongue-in-cheek Beiruti greeting was “Hi, keefak, ça va?” And no wonder that, in order to actually practice my Arabic, I had had to take bus trips out of town. For Beirutis, the linguistic mishmash was a source of pride, even for Rana. “But,” she cautioned, correcting herself, “when I say everyone in Lebanon is trilingual, of course it’s not everyone. It’s really a certain class.”

  Rana’s frank attitude encouraged me to share my own Arabic difficulties. I told her about my plan for a dialect makeover in Beirut, and how I felt stymied by the sectarian differences I couldn’t help but notice everywhere. Whose language should I learn, exactly?

  She didn’t deny there were different ways of speaking in Lebanon, but, just as Dutch Danny had, she told me not to worry about it. “So you won’t say it like they say it in Kaslik,” she said gently, waving a slim hand. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Kaslik—what does that mean?”

  “It’s an expression,” she said. She let out the tiniest exasperated sigh. “Kaslik is, like, the ultimate Christian street in the ultimate Christian town in the ultimate Christian governorate.”

  Lebanon, where every acre was spoken for, would have a place like this. I imagined some picturesque spot on Mount Lebanon, the Christian core of the country: a narrow lane in a tiny village, a gnarled old olive tree, church bells pealing as two aged monks bent over their canes by a weathered stone wall. I bade good morning to the black-clad men—and they recoiled, as I said some obviously Muslim phrase. Oh, well.

  Rana drove me home in her creaky, sun-bleached Volvo station wagon (“my communist car”). I immediately went to my laptop and looked up this mythical Kaslik. It was a real place, but instead of a historic mountain village, I found it was a town on the coast north of Beirut. The photos showed red Ferraris, beach clubs, and women sporting surgically inflated lips and tiny halter tops. Rana was right: I was never going to say it like they say it in Kaslik.

  Land of Thorns

  In my last week of classes, Peter arrived for a visit. At the snack stand across from our apartment, he somehow circumvented all Beirut etiquette, within minutes bonding with the counterman over their shared religion. “That’s the first time in my life I’ve gotten a high-five for being Greek Orthodox,” he said with a laugh, as he bit into his little handbag-shaped ka’keh sandwich.

  When classes ended, Dutch Danny hosted a party at his place: Lebanese pop on a small boom box, smoking on the balcony, a mix of nationalities chatting on the spare furniture of his temporary apartment. Irene’s Lebanese husband was at the party. He gave us a lesson in folding pita bread properly for use as a hummus scoop, and asked us our plans. Peter and I were going hiking in the Chouf Mountains east of Beirut.

  “Oh, the Druze area,” Irene’s husband said. “They say the qaf there.” One of his uncles was from the Chouf, and they all made fun of him. “We call him a duck. Waq-waq-waq,” he chortled, making the sound I recognized from the Egyptian song I had learned long ago, the one about Mom bringing home a bag with a duck in it.

  “Hey, knock it off,” Irene spoke up. “I love the qaf! It might be my favorite letter.”

  The qaf is one of the more elegant letters in the Arabic alphabet, as it exhales in a delicate pop from the back of the throat. Unfortunately, most dialects don’t pronounce it. Egyptians make it a glottal stop; many Gulf Arabs make it a g. I gave Irene a nod of solidarity, for defending the qaf and for having a favorite Arabic letter in the first place. I decided the hiking trip would be a quest for the qaf.

  Just as Peter and I were saying our goodbyes to my classmates, a band of teenagers delivered argeeleh. The last thing I saw as I looked back through the door was Kaspar sprawled out on a mattress smoking the pipe, like a bony odalisque.

  Our first afternoon hiking, outside Jezzine, Peter and I got lost. We thrashed and cursed our way through a gully filled with dense, fragrant yellow broom before we discovered our error. My invectives came more from fear than from frustration. The trail book had suggested the faintest possibility of encountering land mines, and encouraged hiring a guide. But after more than a month of Arabic classes in busy Beirut, I craved the solitary quiet of hiking. And I had faith in my navigation skills. Peter and I didn’t need help, I decided.

  But here we were in this canyon, no trail to be seen. Hadn’t Michel, the tour guide on the weekend hiking trip up north, said there were land mines here in Jezzine? Or had he said Janine, some other village down here in the south? As I walked and scrabbled and clambered, I replayed the scene in my head, the group laughing nervously at the edge of the overlook. Then Peter and I thrashed and cursed our way back the way we had come. When we finally reached the safety of a dirt road, I confessed my fears to Peter, and the stupid choice I’d made by not hiring a guide.

  “Oh, we’ll be OK,” he said, unfazed, although his arms were scratched and bleeding. “Besides, it would have been annoying to talk to someone all day.”

  As penance, I practiced my Arabic as we walked. Aside from calling myself an amerkaniyeh, I had not managed to adopt much of a Lebanese accent at all. In fact, my Egyptian p
ronunciation seemed stronger than ever. Nor had I been able to shake my Cairo-learned habit of saying inshallah after every future-tense statement, though Zaina had tsked every time. In Egypt, it was so common that it meant not so much the literal “God willing” as a routine “hopefully,” but to Zaina’s cosmopolitan Beiruti ears, I must have sounded like a superstitious hick.

  In my head, anyway, Lebanese sounded lovely. El-jebel—the mountains—I murmured. The j was soft and languid, like a French g. El-’anzeh, the goat—it had just a hint of an ʼayn at the start, and a lovely drawled -eh. The goat in question, which we encountered in the middle of the road, was tiny, knock-kneed, and belligerent. Showk, thistle. These were everywhere, in possibly as many varieties as there were sects in Lebanon. Some radiated out in complex fractals; others ended in silver, spiky heads like medieval weapons; still others glowed bright purple, flowers, stems, and all. I wished I knew their names. My favorite thistle, the artichoke, was kharshoof. When I had ordered one in a Beirut restaurant, the waiter corrected me: I wanted an ardishowki. The Arabized English almost made sense. In Arabic, ard is land, showk is thistle. Lebanon, land of prickly things, I thought, remembering the taxi drivers of Beirut, who cursed their way through the thickets of the city.

  Descending from the ridge to what our guidebook told us would be the Shrine of Nabi Ayoub, a Druze pilgrimage site dedicated to Job, of Old Testament fame, we found the trail covered in two large carpets. A grill was set up, and a family picnic was under way. The patriarch greeted us with a handful of dates and an ice-cold can of Pepsi.

  Peter and I had been hiking in solitude for almost eight hours, interacting only with goats and scratchy plants. Now we stared in wonder, like aliens fresh off our UFO, at the lavish picnic, the gleaming white domed building topped with a multicolored star, the crowds bustling all around. Who were these dazzling people and their exotic ways? And most important—I remembered my mission—were they saying the qaf?