The Power of The Tradition
Nassar Mansour is notable for the mission we see in his art
and his writing to give new life to the venerable Muhaqqaq
script, one of the six classical scripts of Arabic calligraphy.
In his Sacred Script (London 2011) Nassar traces the history
of this script and, together with examples of his own work
which show Muhaqqaq’s versatility, he offers a new copybook
(Amshaq) for learning to write the script. He has now published
this copybook in separate form (Istanbul 2017) to give us the
first extant copybook of its kind. No other examples have come
down to us from the past. Nassar’s own researches to define
these letter forms, were made across many years in manuscript
collections from Istanbul to Europe to the Middle East.
Nassar’s book is titled Sacred Script, because Muhaqqaq
expresses the centrality in Islamic calligraphy of faith - faith’s
inspiring power, its beauty and what it proposes for the
human subject by way of self control, fidelity and humility.
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