Calligraphies at the frontiers of the Islamicate World – CallFront

During the medieval and modern periods, the use of calligraphy in Arabic script expanded to all languages transcribed in the Arabic alphabet and its variants, giving rise to a large variety of styles, found on multiple objects and monuments throughout Islamicate world. In certain regions far from its historical cradle, and more precisely from the city of Baghdad where the norms for classical calligraphy in Arabic script were defined, the developments of calligraphy clearly stand out from the canon and seem to follow their own rules. These regions correspond to the Iberian Peninsula, the Maghreb, Sub-Saharan Africa, Anatolia, the Balkans, India, South-East Asia and China. They are known as the “frontiers” of the Islamicate world, both because of their distance from the historical centre of the Islamic civilisation and because they correspond to interfaces with other civilisations and linguistic systems. Scattered studies have highlighted some of the calligraphies which emerged and developed in these regions, as well as similarities between these calligraphies. However, the fragmentation of corpora and the lack of textual documentation have, until now, limited larger scale research.
In order to understand and document the making and the developments of calligraphy in Arabic script in all these regions, on a longue-durée perspective, the project Calligraphies in Arabic Script at the Frontiers of the Islamicate World (CallFront) aims to assemble corpora and textual or oral documentation related to them thanks to a consortium of specialists in these frontier scripts. CallFront is structured on two complementary axes. First, the development of a digital corpus, based on an ontology adapted to the largest possible variety of styles, which makes research data accessible to all and interconnects widely dispersed corpora. The database is developed with the Open-Source system OMEKA and it is hosted by the TGIR Huma-Num, meeting the requirements of FAIR principles. The second axis of CallFront consists in an in-depth study of praxis, in order to overcome the absence of conventional sources (usually treatises about calligraphy or mentions in literary and administrative texts). This study of praxis is based on an experimental methodology built in close collaboration with a team of professional calligraphers, as well as on fieldwork with the few remaining calligraphers trained in these scripts.