De l’àdab del cal·lígraf (1)
Pablo
Khalid Casado
The Qalam and its
Shavings
The qalam we use to write calligraphy might
seem like a simple piece of bamboo, but for Muslim calligraphers it has a very
special significance and a number of rituals are closely connected to the qalam [pen].
In Muslim
literature, we find that the first thing God created was the qalam, and its duty was to record every
event that happens in one’s life. Similarly, we find that in the Qur’an a whole
chapter, Surat al-Qalam, the
sixty-eight chapter, takes its name from the qalam.
We should also keep
in mind that the calligrapher spends a great amount of time every day, and
during his whole life, with the qalam
in his hand, such that the qalam becomes a prolongation of the
calligapher’s hand. A prolongation which is used to express some ideas and
feelings on the paper. The qalam
therefore, is the most sacred tool for a calligrapher.
As such, a ritual
respected by students of calligraphy is to keep all the shavings you get every
single time you cut and sharpen your qalam.
Most of what calligraphers write, not everything but most of it, is directly
related to Qur’anic verses of Hadiths (teachings from the prophet Muhammad). And
this is one of the reasons why we keep the shavings of the qalam; we don’t want to throw a part of the tool we use to write
sacred texts to the trash and mixt them with garbage.
Therefore, the
tradition says that the calligrapher has to keep all his shavings since the day
he starts learning calligraphy until the day that he dies, and when death falls
upon a calligrapher, his family collects the shavings and puts them to fire in
boiling the water they will use, to wash the body of the calligrapher (in
Muslim tradition, the family is still in charge of the deceased’s body). In
other words, when the calligrapher disappears from this world in its material
form, the shaving of his qalam also
disappears.
Khalid Pablo Casado, The art of Islamic Calligraphy:
Rituals and Traditional Art. themaydan.com January 8, 2018.
