Arabic calligraphy has a rich history spanning a millennium.
As Islam forbids portraying images of sentient beings, artists in Muslim countries turned to calligraphy for the beautification of architecture.
This August, Dhaka residents experienced walls with beautiful Arabic calligraphy.
Abdur Rahman Al Fatih, a student at Jamia Islamia Darul Uloom Madania in Jatrabari, is one of many who calligraphed walls across the city.
Fatih started his calligraphy journey in 2021. He began lettering on paper and canvas after taking classes under caligrapher Junayed Ahmad.
In August, Fatih formed a team with two seniors, Khaled Saifullah and Hifzul Karim Jihad, to caligraph walls across the capital and beyond.
For this team, caligraphing started at a pillar in Hasnabad. Afterwards, Fatih started to get requests from many people.
When asked about painting on walls, Fatih told Dhaka Tribune: “Obviously, there is a difference between painting on canvasses and walls. We use colours and shapes to turn calligraphies on canvasses into a painting.”
According to Fatih, painting on walls is more difficult than painting on canvasses.
On canvasses, he uses acrylic paint and plastic paint on walls, which is a bit more difficult during colour mixing.
“As wall art is bigger than canvas art, if we use many colours, it will look cluttered,” he said.
“Most of the time we only paint Arabic letters instead of verses from the Quran or Hadith.”
Fatih’s reason behind that is walls are public and not in a controlled environment; if verses from the Quran or Hadith are calligraphed on walls, they might get damaged in many ways. “It would be disrespectful to the sacred texts.”
He continued: “In some of our works, we calligraphed verses from the Quran because we saw the environment was controlled.”
Abdur and his team calligraphed a verse from the Quran in the Ekuria underpass.
“Most people treat the Arabic script as sacred. But we can see that it is being used everywhere in Middle Eastern countries, just like we use the Bangla script,” he said.
Fatih gets his inspiration from the Palestinian caligrapher Belal Khaled.
“I started calligraphy from passion, but now I can take it as a full-time profession.”
“However, I want to keep it as my passion,” he added.
Canvasses painted in Arabic calligraphy are in growing demand in the country. A calligraphed canvas can be sold for Tk2,000-Tk10,000 depending on the size and lettering. Some offices and homeowners also want their walls to be calligraphed.
“It feels amazing when people appreciate our work and take photos and videos. Now some people recognize me from my work, what more can an artist expect?” Fatih said.
