Kufic

The early angular hand of the Arabic script — geometrical, severe, and the form in which the oldest Qurans were written.

Kufic — كوفي, "of Kufa" — is the oldest of the named Arabic calligraphic styles. It takes its name from the city of Kufa in southern Iraq, founded as a garrison town in the 630s, but the style was not invented there in any neat sense; the name reflects an early association rather than a precise origin. What is clear is that for the first three or four centuries of Islamic written culture, Kufic was the dominant hand for high-status documents, and above all for the Quran. Almost every surviving Quran manuscript from before the eleventh century is in some form of Kufic.

Origins and development

The earliest Arabic-script documents — late seventh- and early eighth-century papyri, inscriptions, and manuscripts — are written in hands sometimes called Hijazi, after the Hijaz region, and characterised by a slight rightward slant and a developing letter geometry. Out of this matrix the more upright, angular, and standardised hand we now call Kufic took shape during the eighth and ninth centuries. By the ninth century, Kufic was the prestige hand for Quranic manuscripts across the Abbasid empire, with regional variants flourishing from Iraq to North Africa. From the late tenth century onward, the rise of the cursive book hands — Naskh in the east, the Maghrebi family in the west — gradually displaced Kufic for ordinary copying. By the twelfth century, Kufic was rare for new Quran manuscripts; from then on its life was as an inscription hand, a decorative hand, and an object of revival.

Visual characteristics

Kufic is angular and geometrical. Letters tend to be built from straight strokes — vertical, horizontal, and diagonal — rather than the curves that dominate Naskh and Thuluth. Such curves as do appear are tight and controlled. Verticals are short relative to horizontals; in the early Kufic Qurans, horizontal extension across the page is the dominant feature, with letters sitting on a long horizontal baseline and the verticals (alif, laam) acting as stops or dividers along it.

Several distinct sub-styles are recognised. Eastern Kufic, sometimes called Karmathian or Iranian Kufic, develops in the tenth and eleventh centuries with thinner strokes, more dramatic vertical extensions, and complex flourishes; it is the form in which many of the most beautiful early Qurans were copied. Floriated Kufic introduces leaf-like terminations on the verticals — small flourishes at the ends of strokes that give the hand a vegetal quality. Geometric Kufic or Square Kufic, sometimes called Banna'i ("masonry") Kufic, treats the script as a tile pattern, fitting letters into a square grid with no curves at all; it appears extensively in architectural decoration of the eleventh through fourteenth centuries, particularly on Persian and Central Asian buildings.

The classical proportional system based on the rhombic dot, central to Naskh and Thuluth, is largely a post-Kufic development. Kufic has its own internal logic of proportion, but it is not the same logic. Letters in Kufic relate to one another through geometry — squares, half-squares, diagonal angles — rather than through dot counting. This is one of the reasons Kufic looks so different from later hands.

Diacritics are largely absent from early Kufic Quran manuscripts. The system of dots that distinguishes letters of similar body (the dotting system that makes baa, taa, thaa, nuun, and yaa visually distinct in modern Arabic) was still developing during the Kufic era and is applied unevenly across surviving manuscripts. Vocalisation, when present in early Quranic Kufic, was often shown as small coloured dots placed above or below the letters rather than as the slashes of later Naskh — red dots for fatHa, others for kasra and Damma, with the conventions varying across manuscripts.

Where you'll see it today

Architectural inscriptions, especially in tile and stone work on historical buildings; modern logos and identity design that want to evoke a clean, geometric, Islamic-modernist register; Quran calligraphy with antiquarian intent; and contemporary fine-art calligraphy. Kufic is one of the styles that twentieth-century Arab and Iranian designers turned to most heavily when trying to develop an Arabic visual vocabulary that felt at once modern and rooted, and its angular geometry has lent itself to logo design in a way that the cursive hands have not. Many corporate identities in the Arab world use Kufic-derived letterforms.

Famous examples

The early Quran manuscripts now distributed across museum collections — leaves in the Topkapı Palace, the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Chester Beatty Library, the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo, and elsewhere — are the canonical body of early Kufic. Particular manuscripts of note include the so-called Birmingham Quran fragment (radiocarbon dated to between roughly 568 and 645 CE, among the very earliest surviving Quranic material), the Sanaa palimpsest, and the "Blue Quran" — a tenth-century North African Quran written in gold Kufic on indigo-dyed parchment, leaves of which are now scattered across multiple collections.

For Geometric Kufic in architecture, the great Seljuk and Timurid buildings of Iran and Central Asia — the Friday Mosques of Isfahan and Yazd, the tile work of Samarkand and Bukhara — are the standard reference. The interiors of the Alhambra in Granada, while best known for their Maghrebi script, also include Kufic bands. The exterior bands of many North African and Andalusian mosques use Kufic-derived inscriptions.

Modern revival

From the mid-twentieth century onward, Kufic has been actively revived as a design idiom. Designers including Hassan Massoudy, Sami Burhan, and many anonymous logo and signage designers across the Arab world have drawn extensively on Square Kufic in particular for an "Islamic-modernist" idiom that pairs well with grid-based graphic design. Today most of the visual quotation of "old" Arabic calligraphy you see in contemporary identity work is Kufic-derived, even when it does not reproduce a historical hand exactly.