Cultural Connectives تواصل الثقافات  (2011)

Cultural Connectives = تواصل الثقافات / Cultural connectives = Tawaṣṣul al-thaqāfāt (2011)
Rana Abou Rjeily
Dustjacket/poster, casebound, decorative doublures, sewn, endbands. H235 x W195 mm. 112 pages. Acquired from Medimops, 23 November 2022.

Rana Abou Rjeily’s is not the only attempt to adapt Arabic to the printing press as Cecil Hourani and Mourad Boutros note in their preface, but their praise for the book is all the more notable for Boutros’ being the creator with Arlette Boutros of Basic Arabic, a widely accepted typeface alongside Nasri Khattar’s Unified Arabic. Still more notable, however, are the ways in which Rjeily’s design and writing weave together multiple aims. One aim, of course, is to introduce Mirsaal, the typeface designed by the author to adapt the calligraphic styles of the Arabic alphabet to the printing press and still be used for the Latin alphabet. Another is to teach the Arabic alphabet to non-native speakers. And still another is to bridge Arabic and Western cultures. The aims are interwoven not only because Rjeily uses the first as the means to the others but because she invests all three into the design of the book.

The dustjacket offers the most mechanical example of this investment. It unfolds into a poster displayof the book’s epigraph from Gibran Khalil Gibran (set in Mirsaal, of course): “We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words”.

Mechanically more subtle than the dustjacket is Rjeily’s use of partial and full bleeds in the pages below — always in support of the meaning on the page. Using both vertical and horizontal bleeds, this double-page spread illustrates the Latin alphabet’s more vertical orientation compared to Arabic’s more horizontal orientation.

Rjeily keeps the material, haptic aspect of both Arabic and Latin close to hand with parallel pages like the following that highlight their alphabets’ differences but also assert the possibility of harmony through design. The same simple green and black color scheme, the same image of nib and mark, and the same angling of text on the page give a unified presentation of the difference in direction and angle of cuts for Arabic and Western nibs. Another physical aspect that Rjeily highlights is the ductus (the order and direction) of a pen strokes making up a letterform, which is arguably more important for Arabic because the flow of writing demands more pen movement.

Other bold, oversized spreads drive home some of the false cognate forms such as 0 and the number 5 written in Arabic-Indic numerals, or the letter V and the number 7 in Arabic-Indic numerals. Others, in an almost children’s book style, present the unique characteristic of an Arabic letterform’s changing shape depending on its initial, medial or final position in a word — or its appearance in isolation. While teaching these differences and features of Arabic is a fundamental aim, always the differences are laying the groundwork or demonstrating what Mirsaal must deal with to bridge a calligraphic system to a typographic system of writing.

The final section presents the Mirsaal typeface in its various fonts (sizes and weights) in the manner of a traditional type specimen, using the very appropriate words of John Henry Mason (1875-1951) in Arabic and English:

Type is like music in having its own beauty, and in being beautiful as an accompaniment and interpretation ; and typography can be used to express a state of the soul, like the other arts and crafts. But like them it is too often used mechanically, and so the full expressiveness of this medium is unrealized. If it is used according to a rule or recipe, it becomes dull and loses vividness. Type appears at first to be a rigid medium; but like other rigid media, it is plastic to the living spirit of a craftsman. — J.H. Mason

Cultural Connectives is the useful reference work Rjeily intends. In achieving its several aims, it also provides both an accomplished example of the book arts and a means of insight into other works in the Books On Books Collection, such as Golnar Adili’s Baabaa Aab Daad (2020), Islam Aly’s 28 Letters (2013), Farah K. Behbehani’s The Conference of the Birds (2009) and Masoumeh Mohtadi’s Blindness (2020).

Further Reading

“Golnar Adili“. 24 November 2022. Books On Books Collection.

“Islam Aly“. 13 January 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Farah K. Behbehani“. 10 December 2022. Books On Books Collection.

“Masoumeh Mohtadi“. 5 February 2021. Books On Books Collection.

Boutros Mourad. 2017. Arabic for Designers : An Inspirational Guide to Arabic Culture and Creativity. London: Thames & Hudson.

Khoury Nammour, Yara 2014. خوري نمور يارا. . Nasri Khattar : A Modernist Typotect. Amsterdam: Khatt Books.