hmed Moustafa is an exemplary and much needed link between Islamic and European cultures. A conversation with him soon reveals the ways in which his practical training and experience as an artist and masterscribe, starting in Egypt and continuing to the present day in England, have been of crucial importance in informing his academic research into the scientific foundation of Arabic lettershapes. Underlying these activities is his strong Islamic belief that enables him to create images of the most intense complexity yet which can have an aesthetic and spiritual appeal to those with little understanding of their linguistic meaning. Balance, duality, complementarity: these are all words Moustafa uses in talking about his work and its inherent source, but they are also equally applicable to the nature of his own professional work. He has maintained an active and fertile tension between academic adventure and studio practice: the significance of this cannot be over-emphasised. Understanding what it means to ‘put pen to paper’ in repetitively beginning a new script generates a foundation of familiarity and enlightens an empathy for the written or thought word. In a very real sense this enables practice to be making perfect, both aesthetically and intellectually. It is impossible to separate form and content in any analysis of Moustafa’s work; the two are inextricably bound up in a common point of conception that is, to do justice to the textural sources that have inspired him, whether from pre-Islamic classical Arabic poetry or, ultimately, the Qur’anic verses that form the heart of his output. However there is a persistent urgency that underpins his oeuvre: to emphasise the true meaning and value of Islamic philosophy through the use of Qur’anic text, and to reaffirm the essential links between A the three monotheistic religions and the scientific and philosophical principles that have informed all subsequent developments in European knowledge. This becomes all the more relevant when working from a studio in London at a time when world politics is so poignantly concerned with religious confrontation. Moustafa’s practice as an artist is complemented by his sustained research over 14 years into the origins of the Arabic lettershape, soon to be realised in a two volume publication, co-authored with Dr Stefan Sperl. This reveals that the Pythagorean principles of proportion that were applied to both music and visual art, which in the Renaissance became known as the Golden Section, were also applied to the Arabic lettershape. The nexus of this rediscovered structure is the dot, that conditions the pen to produce strokes based on exact ratios, to harmonise each letter with the rest of the alphabet. It is the dot that both contains and generates the structural morphology upon which the whole foundation of Islamic art and architecture is built. It governs the entire visual field and is seen as the underlying code that provides harmony to our very existence. In striving for what he identifies as ‘the immutable essence of things’, Moustafa is seeking to arrive at an art that crosses cultures by addressing the generic, primordial state of the human. In so doing he engages with agency, facilitating and revealing through highly sophisticated craft practices sacred symbols and metaphors that are embedded in Islamic text and image, yet with the visual energy to reach an inner commonality. As he puts it, ‘to emphasise that invisible common vocabulary between us: our eyes see the same objects, but with different words to describe them.’ Jeremy Theophilus June 2008 previous page next page