raising a script from the dead

(Arguably) The best calligrapher alive, Hasan Chelebi tells how he grew to learn the art at a period when the Arabic language- reading, writing, reciting- was banned in Turkey. Everything locked up in libraries or attics (see Orhan Pamuk's White Castle), the one thing that was open to the public and that offered up vestiges of a forgotten language and a forgotten script were the cemeteries. So he started to haunt them, and indeed, learned his trade from a stone carver, who now presumably carved in Latin letters, but who preserved his knowledge of the Arabic-Ottoman script. This is how one traces his lineage through tombstones, how one revives a language with the help of the dead.



There is so much to be said about how the dead preserve our lineage. Consider the above, Christian tombstone in Cairo "el merhum iskender kasim"