The Twenty-Ninth Letter

A calligrapher's muse

Apologies for the silence last week, due to a busy patch with a show in West London, a colour workshop, and working on my ongoing Book of Abjad crowdfunder.

Yesterday I finished painting the last of the Lām-Alifs that are part of this project, so this is the perfect opportunity to write about this letter, which is integral to the Arabic script without actually belonging to the canonical abjad of twenty-eight letters.

Lām-Alif لا is a compulsory ligature of the letters Lām ل and Alif ا; in other words when they follow each other in this order, they are written as a single character. In its basic essence, the letter is made up of two lines crossing, linked at the base.

Essential lām-alif

Beyond this, and because its structure is so unlike any other letter, its exact design is open to infinite creative variations and has long captured the imagination of calligraphers. In any given text (at least before the script got standardised), you would be likely to find that every occurence of the character is designed slightly differently.

Tenth-century tombstone from Egypt with no less than five different designs. Metropolitan Museum of Art acc.no. 2010.225

In just one twelfth-century volume¹ , I found close to a hundred different Lām-Alif designs! Here are just two dozen of them:

It’s hard to pick a favourite, isn’t it?

And here are my own 28, all based on historical examples I found on various objects: astrolabes, tombstones and wall inscriptions².

Because the letter Alif is taken by Islamic mystics to symbolise the Divine, this combination of Alif with Lām came to be seen as an image of divine Union, the merging of lover and Beloved. But this is another story...

1. I have mentioned it before, in The Story of Kāf: It’s the British Library MS Or. 6573, affectionately known as Mahmoud’s.

2. This is a montage – the originals are individual pieces among my campaign’s rewards, all painted in mineral pigments.