| In the late 80s, I was dispatched by Letter eX to cover a joint reading by Palestinian and Jewish writers at the University of Illinois. The program was held in a gallery filled with art from Palestine: drawings by children caught in the intifada, sketches and paintings by Israeli and Palestinian artists and Arabic calligraphic art.
Since then I've wondered whether there is such an experience in the secular west. After all, what do we do with our language? We spit it out with aggression and verve on stage. We publish it in plain books and read it in polite gatherings. We spike pop music with it. Occasionally, as in Avital Ronell's "The Telephone Book," the nature of the text is itself a text, an alternate channel to the words themselves, but even Ronell's typographic channeling is less an aesthetic expression than a critique of communication. It aspires to artistic ends, and touches them, but it does not suggest such ends are the central purposes of the book. Enter telematics, hypermedia, and holopoetry.
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That last element harkened to a moment I had at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, and really triggered my imagination. Classic Islamic culture refrains from direct representation in art, so the creative spark has to find other releases -- designs, decorations, abstractions, patterns, textures -- which ravish, delight, and enrapture the eye in lieu of more earthly and literal pleasures. A visit to the Taj Mahal in India or to any other great mosque will verify this. This calligraphy, the high art of presenting the poetry of the Qur'an, is a divine and reverent mediation.