The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy

Incredible scholarship, accessible writing, illustrations that do a great job of demonstrating the points made in the text. What a find. Anyone interested in this subject should buy this book.

Although the author has a clear writing style, the technical terms and his tendency to move from broad comparisons, over-detailed descriptions and short conclusions distract the reader, leaving some sense of disconnectedness between themes. One is also at a loss trying to uncover the main argument of the book. He spends many pages making lengthy comparisons with other scribal traditions to finally describe what they had in common and how they differed. That could be done in even less pages -- and a great deal of the book is about image examples. The bottom line: the book is short, but could be even shorter. The figures and the place where their respective captions are placed on the page don't help the reader, either. It is finally not a book for the beginner in Islamic Calligraphy, as it assumes a great deal of knowledge (not only in Islamic calligraphy, but also codicology and paleography) that is only sparsely mentioned or alluded to in the text. The various styles of kufi calligraphy are given in a large appendix, but the meaning and the significance of all those (17!) styles, in themselves and for the argument of the text, is not explained in a straightforward way.

The illustrations are great. The text is disappointing. George follows Francois Deroche's line of thinking when something more original and innovative might have been better.

le livre est un condensé de la naissance de la calligraphie islamique et surtout regroupe principalement les travaux de monsieur Francois Deroche en appuyant sa thèse pour la définition des styles de calligraphie etc... et je la soutient sa thèse est la PLUS cohérente!Monsieur Alain george a fait un travail magnifique le livre est magnifique il reprend la naissance de la calligraphie islamiqueet donne les différents styles c'est de l'art pur!il y a entre autre le coran bleu et celui d'ibn al bawwab(ceux qui m'ont le plus marqué)un livre a ce procuré pour les étudiants en art islamique un must have