Impressions of a Murakkaa
Mohamed Zakariya
Seyh Hamdullah
So, who was this Seyh? (I use the Turkish word, not Shaykh – it’s easier to say and fits English better.) He was born in Amasya, a town full of illustrious calligraphers. His father, Mustafa Dede, was a Sufi Seyh, so Hamdullah signed many of his works “son of the Seyh.” Prince Beyazid (1450-1512) befriended him and took calligraphy lessons from him. When he became sultan in 1481, Beyazid invited Hamdullah to Constantinople, where he became the top professional calligrapher of the Ottoman Empire. Known as Seyh because he was the leading figure in the archery lodge, Hamdullah followed other interests in addition to calligraphy. He was a record-setting archer well into his later years, as well as a cook, a tailor, and a swimmer – clearly a fit athlete all his life. Seyh Hamdullah taught a huge number of students. He is thought to have copied 47 mushafs (copies of the Kuran), as well as a large number of smaller books, scrolls, individual kit’as (pieces), and murakkaas. In addition, he filled many mosques with magnificent permanent inscriptions in architectural settings. These are in large jeli sulus or jeli muhakkak scripts. Nevertheless, his true calligraphic legacy is, I believe, his development of the nesih script, changing it from a practical, utilitarian script for copying texts into a script of power and elegance – what should be called the international style of writing nesih. It is the style most calligraphers following him would depend on in their work. Many of Seyh Hamdullah’s murakkaas were assembled using special ebru papers, some, we believe, made by the greatest ebru marbler of all time, Mehmed Hattib (d. 1773). Koltuks (geometric spaces on the right and left of the text) often are elaborately decorated, but many in the Seyh’s works are left elegantly blank. In addition, they are usually more square in shape. The square koltuks sometimes required a smaller version of the nesih text. As time passed, it became more common to make koltuks more rectangular, or even triangular, and soon these spaces became more standardized. There is about Seyh Hamdullah’s albums, even if highly decorated, a powerful simplicity, which provides a strong artistic look.
Taklid
Students and connoisseurs collected some of the Seyh’s smaller works found on single sheets of paper. These were pasted together in ways that look random, thus confusing students, scholars, and curators, as there is no textual follow-through on some of them. Among these pieces were favored texts that he also taught his students. His albums could be thought of as private exhibitions. Students could take an album home to study, as the album’s shape and layout allowed for easy set up and use. Teachers must have loaned such works to advanced students so they could make taklids of them. Taklid is an ancient Arabic word that has, as usual, a bewildering quantity of possible meanings: to twist a string or rope, to string beads, to put a necklace on someone, to invest someone with an important office or dignity, and on and on. At worst, the word took on the pejorative sense of to copy blindly or to allow a practice to become traditional. Among calligraphers, however, taklid took on a special meaning: to try to copy another work as an homage or, by copying, to learn the inner strategy of how the work was produced. To do this, the calligrapher has to figure out the cut of the original pen (that is, reverse-engineer the pen), duplicate the original ink, and try to hold the pen in the same way as the original calligrapher did. The goal is to reproduce a copy of the original so close that it is almost a photographic copy. Such works were never to be called forgeries, although forgery was known. Some master calligraphers specialized in making taklids. Two come to mind: Omer Vasfi, who once made so close a copy of a piece by Sami Efendi that it cannot be distinguished from the original; and his brother, Neyzen Emin Efendi, who was also a master of the large reed flute, or ney.
The Murakkaa
A murakkaa can take one of several forms, such as the simple album, or the book murakkaa, which opens page by page like a book, or the bellows murakkaa, in which the pages are bound edge to edge and can be viewed one or two at a time or, if stretched out, all at once. In either format, all the pages are edged in thin-skived leather. On older albums, sometimes the leather would rot and the album fall apart. The individual pages of the damaged album would thengenerally be added to other collections, or the original album could be, as deserved, completely restored. The individual pages of an album are called kit’as. Various layouts were possible. Albums consisting of a series of hadises (or hadiths, Maxims of the Prophet), were called hadis murakkaasi. Collections of kit’as by different calligraphers were called toplama murakkaasi. There were also sequential albums made up of kit’as in a particular order. These were very specific works: one would read all the lines in sulus script, kit’a by kit’a, and then go back and read all the lines in nesih script. Albums were widely used and clearly played a large part in raising the quality of calligraphy being produced and in developing calligraphers who were experts in learning their masters’ style. One murakkaa by the Seyh has passed through generations and was still being copied in the late 19th century, namely, the Kisra Anushirvan text, used by Seyh Hamdullah and copied by others, finally by Hasan Riza (d. 1920). It remains a work worthy of study.
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A note on accents:
Seyh – S with cedilla
Omer Vasfi – O with umlaut
Celebi – C with cedilla
kit’a – apostrophe before the a
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