Calligrapher Nihad Dukhan
Respects Tradition as He Creates
Modern Designs
Eleni Zaras
QUIET AND ISOLATION, conditions we are all perhaps more accustomed to these days, are not unfamiliar to calligrapher and engineering professor Nihad Dukhan. “I, like many artists, normally have to work for long periods in self-imposed isolation,” he pointed out.
Originally from Gaza, Dukhan came to Toledo, OH in 1983 for his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Jazz musician Miles Davis, a view overlooking railroad tracks, and boredom defined the artist and engineer’s early days in the United States. It was also a time when he began to miss the Arabic language and to practice calligraphy without particular purpose. Today, not only is Dukhan a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Detroit Mercy, but he is a master calligrapher.
Arabic calligraphy is a millennium-old art form with strict rules and traditions. Dukhan spent 11 years diligently training with Hasan Çelebi in Istanbul—in-person and through mail—to achieve his ijazah, a master scribe degree, in the Thuluth and Naskh styles. The ijazah qualification, he explains, “allows you to represent and talk about calligraphy, to sign your work, and to teach calligraphy according to traditional methods.” In 2013, he achieved his ijazah in a third style, the Taliq style, under the tutelage of Mohamed Zakariya in Arlington, VA.
While he writes Qur’anic verses in traditional calligraphic scripts, Dukhan also takes creative liberties in his set of modern works—restyling traditional techniques into his own innovative designs. Taking a word or concept in Arabic, he arranges the letters to abstractly illustrate the form or meaning of the word itself. For instance, for qalam-ملق (“pen” in Arabic) he stretches the letter “lam” into a thin, vertical column as the body of the pen, and the tail of the letter “meem” coming to its sharp point. It is a style he has polished, taking inspiration from Miles Davis’ minimalist and succinct phrasing, but some of the ideas came to him as if “witnessing a birth,” he describes, “as if I wasn’t doing it myself.”
Dukhan also noted that individual Arabic letters themselves are a source of artistic inspiration. “Would you hang a ‘W’ in your living room?” he asked, laughing. “In Arabic, the letter itself is so beautiful people do actually do this!”
While he believes traditional calligraphy is not in danger, Dukhan said his contemporary adaptations of the art form are a way he hopes to reach broader audiences. “This modern form, I thought, would be more appealing to people who don’t know Arabic,” but also to Arab-Americans, through form, simplicity, space and shapes.
From small coffee shop exhibitions in Toledo, to gallery exhibitions across the U.S., in Kuwait, the UAE and Istanbul, his work has gained recognition among Arabic speakers and non-Arabic speakers alike.
Despite these exhibitions and an existing high-end market for calligraphic works, there is a general “ignorance about calligraphy,” he lamented. Art historians may be interested “in a legacy, a history, but they bypass contemporary artists as an important source of information or correction of misconception or undoing myths about Arabic calligraphy.”
As many contemporary artists incorporate calligraphy into their works, the lack of education in the field results in a lack of sufficient criticism. Like any other art, “calligraphy can be bad,” he says bluntly, “some people think they can hide behind color or symmetry to create an effect.” Or, if someone writes something sacred, they “can get away with it [because it’s sacred], but it can be bad calligraphy.”
Even among his family in Gaza, he is unsure if they understand or appreciate his work, citing, in part, the proliferation of English and the subsequent ignorance of calligraphy’s rich history. As a child, he practiced writing with friends on the walls, “silly things—names of Egyptian soccer players for instance,” but became more serious and would cut his own pens to mimic fountain pens in order to practice. While he was praised for his handwriting by his family, it was not something he was encouraged to pursue in an artistic or professional capacity.
Currently, the stay-at-home orders have not dramatically changed his routine. “Artists are typically reflective,” he stresses, though “they should not need a crisis to start reflecting.” However, he is taking the extra quiet time to study the Diwani Jali style and knows that, during this period, “ideas will simmer and I may come up with designs related to this crisis.”
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