Pixels in Islamic Art: Square Kufic Calligraphy (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Pixels in Islamic Art: Square Kufic Calligraphy (2020)

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I always enjoyed the cover of Jeff Erickson‘s Algorithms book, which is al-Khwarizmi in this style.

https://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khwarizmi

Mardin Artuklu University logo is in this style: http://www.artuklu.edu.tr

If you look closely, you should be able to see "Mardin Artuklu Üniversitesi" in the labyrinth.

Worth noting that Kufi writing originates from the region of Kufa in modern-day Iraq, also the source of the Kufiyyeh headdress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kufa

Just to clarify I don’t think that first image is Kufic script, whereas the second is the shahada (author calls it the shada)

I’m not sure about the 2 kinds of scripts claim, I think there are a few more than that.

Not sure, I think first image is square or geometric Kufic (sometimes called "Satrancli Kûfi" in Turkish) of course looks quite different than typical Kufic script.

The problem is I don't think the first one says anything, which, however stylistic, is still the point of a script. If it doesn't actually make a meaningful expression then it's not a script. What word has 20 s's in it?

There's some good examples on wikipedia as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

As someone with zero exposure to Kufic script before today, some of those images, and particular the circle ones in the original article, remind me of the London Underground "Labyrinth" mazes https://www.tubeopedia.co.uk/labyrinth-locations

> There's some good examples on wikipedia as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

This is not the link you intended...

Odd. It was just the wiki page for “Kufic”.

Such abstraction can be used to obfuscate information. Could they contain and have contained hidden messages? Hushed passwords to enter secret areas of the temples hidden in plain sight?

I always found Kufi to be a form of space-filling curves[0], which was the original purpose: a form of decoration that can fill a surface such as edges around a building[1, 2], without depicting humans in stone, a form of art historically forbidden in Islam due the prevalence of statue idolatry at the time. Hence the prevalence of geometry (Zellij [3]) and calligraphy in areas historically islamic.

Hilbert curves [4] could be the substrate (the coordinate system), and Kufi writing could be indeed encoded information maybe by XORing each point between the curve and the kufi word.

I'm just blabbering around. But it's difficult to disassociate the two in my mind.

0: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/kufi-ayat-kursi-al...

1: https://i0.wp.com/majnouna.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/...

2: https://i.pinimg.com/236x/f2/f7/e9/f2f7e99d6bfe75042313adbe6...

3: https://zellige.info/

4: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christoph-Schierz/publi...

I had the idea of making a QR code generator that embeds those "Kufi" "scripts" but never got to do it. Now with LLM image generators it's pretty feasible

This one is not Kufic, but it's my favorite:

https://imgur.com/a/G9RAzGv

Incomprehensible for outsiders. Though, any script can be fit into "square" writing.

Some more easily than others.

It varies, the example from the Topkapi Scroll, with the tile-like patterns of triangles and swastikas, took me a minute to recognize (but it's been 25yr since I took Arabic as an undergrad). Some of the other examples are fun, the shahada that looks like minarets is actually mirrored text, so it reads backwards from the left and normally (well, it's super-stylized) from the right.

Greatest shibboleths of them all.

Very cool!

Why is there only an accept option for cookies?

Because they can. I've encountered plenty of pages like this and it would seem that doing so is risk free.

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