In December/early January, I went to Istanbul. One of my friends recommended that we stop by the book bazaar near Beyazit, and there I discovered probably my favorite place in all of Sultanahmet: the Sahaflar Carsisi.
The picture of the cat is gratuitous.
Anyway, apparently this is the place to buy calligraphy supplies in Sultanahmet (unless you can tell me of any others; I know of a place near Sakip Sabanci but that was way too far for us). And even though I have 5439850 reed pens from Pakistan, I thought I should pick some up from Turkey. At first I thought I shouldn't be greedy, so I just bought one. But I got it at a really good price--4 lira, or maybe less?--and, because we were in a hurry to get to Faruk Gulluoglu before it closed that day, we decided to stop by the next day.
The next day, I went to a different shop in the Sahaflar Carsisi to look at calligraphy pens. I guess it was way more obvious this time that we were tourists because the guy was giving us much higher prices than the guy from a different shop the previous day. Usually I am pretty good at bargaining, but for some reason I picked up a reed pen for 10 lira and a celi pen for 55 (I think the guy from the previous day was selling this for 25). I knew it was overpriced but the guy was so stubborn on pricing that I bought them anyway.
I was pretty mad at myself about this for a few days but, oh well... I'll try to hold my ground the next time. I haven't really done any calligraphy in a long time, so after this incident I decided that I ought to start making use of my new, overpriced pens.
Recently, I also read part of a biography of Leonardo. I didn't know that Leonardo was infamous for procrastination and that he rarely finished things, fearing them to be not perfect enough. Of course, I am no Leonardo, but I realized I have the same inhibition sometimes, especially with calligraphy--I never finish something, or just keep practicing, because it never seems good enough. I also never finished reading this biography of Leonardo, haha.
Here is something I spent a couple of days practicing. It is a couplet from one of Faiz's poems, "Don't Ask Me for That Same Love Again" or something like that. I'm sure you can find translations online but, as is often the case with translations, it is hard to do the original poem justice.
"There are other joys than the joy of love,
There are other pains than the pain of heartbreak"
This poem, by the way, is not referring to romantic love but instead to love for one's country. In this case, Faiz's country. And, in case you are wondering, this does not reflect my own personal feelings for any country.
As I've probably mentioned before, I find nastaliq extremely difficult. I can count a dozen mistakes here--the nun is wider than it should be deep, the
wa sal lines are not thin enough... I lost my Xacto knife, which makes it hard to knick any rough edges and smooth things over.
The image above is just on 20 lb paper; thanks to my job, I know the paper weight. Regular paper isn't well suited for calligraphy because of its roughness. Smooth paper is preferable for calligraphy because the lines are sharper and the pen glides much more easily. However, for some reason my 2+ year old inks are showing up much lighter on
ahar (don't inks get dry, not diluted, with age?) so I primarily practiced on 20 lb paper.
I also gave it a shot on
ahar and this is the result:
As you can see, I forgot one word and had to add it later on. And there is a decent smudge on the first line. I will probably give this another shot tomorrow and update if it turns out any better.
I've realized that my areas of improvement in calligraphy reflect some other things from my daily life: I move too fast, and press my pen too hard. In real life, I definitely speak a little faster than I should when explaining things, and I have the opposite problem in that I don't press my pen hard enough when writing in English (this results in lots of blank NCR forms).
I know I said that this poem doesn't reflect my feelings, but I have to say that things were going really well--
extremely well--and now there's some impending uncertainty looming ahead. And that's what brought me to this poem after a long time.
But anyway, nastaliq--very difficult. Much improvement needed. Since I am pretty much self-taught, it's really hard to find resources for nastaliq online. I will try to pick some up on my next trip to Pakistan. Writing in nastaliq seems to be an ubiquitous skill in Pakistan. So many signs (for shops, advertisements, political slogans) are written by hand, in nastaliq, and I wonder if it is a skill that is appreciated. (It probably is, and I'm too removed from the local population to know.)
It seems like a lot of Turkish was written in nastaliq as well. Obviously, they've adopted the Latin script but there's lots of nastaliq in Topkapi, although thulth and naskh seem to dominate doorways and larger text.
Turkey is such a beautiful place. One thing I do find surprising, though, is that you absolutely cannot enter the more tourist-y mosques without a headscarf if you are a woman. In Pakistan, most masjids are inaccessible to women, but the tourist attractions that are mosques don't care if you wear one or not and women are given space to pray in the front--they/we have nearly have half of the masjid. This is not the case at any of the masjids I went to in Turkey. I do not care about the headscarf part--it is just interesting to me, and I certainly prefer it--but the space issue is a recurring problem in a lot of mosques.
I can't remember if I saw much calligraphy in mosques in Pakistan, during my trip last July.
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| I guess here's some, from one of the tombs at Chaukhandi |
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| Not much at the Shah Jahan masjid |
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| Here's something from the fort at Khaplu |
Colorful vegetal motifs dominate Wazir Khan:
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| Also at Badshahi, which is a huge masjid |
I guess calligraphy wasn't a very prevalent decorative motif in south Asian architecture. Not as much as in areas controlled by the Ottoman Empire, it seems. Although, I did visit Isa Bey Camii in Selcuk and there wasn't much calligraphy there (it's a much earlier mosque than most of those in Istanbul):
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| As you can see, part of the calligraphic panel has broken off |
I have to say, whenever I'm in Turkey I can't help but wonder how differently Pakistan would have turned out it if hadn't had to bear colonial rule... historical buildings in Pakistan are generally so terribly maintained--even vandalized--that it makes one feel sad when visiting them. Of course, if there are any public resources it makes sense to use them towards poverty and education first before preservation... how nice would it have been if this kind of poverty wasn't the result of so many historical incidents (colonialism, divide and rule, partition, et cetera). It is bad historical judgment to fantasize about what could have been, but sometimes... who cares.
