Mouneer Al-Shaarani

Mounir Al-Shaarani (Syria/Egypt) graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus (1977). He studied under the great Syrian calligrapher, Badawi Al Dirany. He worked as a calligrapher since 1968, and as a designer of books and various printed matter. He also designed several custom typefaces. His work has been exhibited internationally; in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunis, Algeria, Morocco, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Switzerland, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Yugoslavia, India and the USA. He is highly regarded internationally, introducing uniquely innovative styles and taking his inspiration from everything around him (old and new).

Where do we start?

With the invention of moveable type, some western printers and orientalists began cutting the first Arabic printing types. These early printing types often lacked precision and refinement due to the lack of familiarity of the western printers with the aesthetic and structural rules of the Arabic script. In addition to this, the conservative Ottoman clergy objected to printing under the pretext that printing Arabic would devalue the holy language of 'God', as well as the existing and magnificent calligraphic manuscripts. This resulted in forcing the early printers to create printing types that closely matched, in form and structure, the existing calligraphic examples. Large type cases were developed with characters that could recreate every possible letter combination. Ultimately the Ottoman clergy were appeased by this development. However, the Arabic script came under another attack with people claiming that Arabic is inappropriate for printing with movable type because of the varied forms of its letters and its inherently complex structure.   Several conferences and debates around this subject took place but did not yield any convincing results or solutions. These arguments I believe could not hold ground in the face of the fact that the Arabic script's flexibility can in fact provide endless possibilities and approaches to the way one may design Arabic typefaces. Nonetheless, these arguments did eventually have a strong impact, and became the base for the simplification of the Arabic letterforms. The size of the type cases and the number of required characters and sorts was reduced, simplifying and speeding up the typesetting process, and later making mechanical typecasting and typesetting (and digital typesetting) much easier and more cost effective.

Though typesetting methods for the Arabic script have gone through the various technological advancements, the actual design of the script was hardly changed or adapted to the contemporary means of communication and media. Not only did the Arabic script remain unchanged throughout but it underwent a slow deterioration, and for various reasons. In my opinion, one of the main reasons for this deterioration is a general lack of a deep understanding of the structural skeletal forms of the script. A proper familiarity with the structure of the script can provide endless possibilities for further development and reinterpretation of the Arabic letterforms.