The Word as Icon: the Role of Writing in Islamic Art

The lecture analyses the many different uses to which writing is put in Islamic art – most obviously as a way not just to decorate and articulate architecture but to add meaning to it and to proclaim the faith in public places. Unlike the art of almost every other culture, Islamic art celebrates writing by using it to cover surfaces large and small and thereby to make them say something, whether to give them religious significance or drive home political messages, to glorify a patron or a poet, or indeed to identify the person whose technical skill made them beautiful. Pots and pans, buckets and bowls, robes and carpets, hangings and coins, tables and lamps, doors and incense burners -all were transformed by writing. And above all, the desire to honour the sacred text of Islam, the Qur’an, by a style of writing worthy of it spurred calligraphers to endless innovation, creating scripts whose idiosyncratic spacing and complex lettering slowed down the very process of reading, an objective correlative to the awesome enigmas of the text itself.

Professor Robert Hillenbrand was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and has spent most of his career teaching at the University of Edinburgh, with visiting professorships at Princeton, UCLA, Bamberg, Dartmouth College, Leiden, New York, Cairo and Groningen. He was Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews for seven years. He has organised nine symposia on Islamic art plus a major exhibition on Persian painting. His scholarly interests focus on Islamic architecture, painting and iconography, with particular reference to Iran and early Islamic Syria. He has written twelve books and co-authored, edited or co-edited a further fourteen. He has also published some 208 articles on aspects of Islamic art and architecture. He has been Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge, is a Fellow of the British Academy and won the King Faisal Prize for Islamic Studies in 2023. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Islamic Art and Architecture.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, Al-Furqan headquarters office in London, London, United Kingdom

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