Muthanna, also known as mirror writing, is a compelling style of Islamic calligraphy composed of a source text and its mirror image placed symmetrically on a horizontal or vertical axis. This style elaborates on various scripts such as Kufic, naskh, and muhaqqaq through compositional arrangements, including doubling, superimposing, and stacking. Muthanna is found in diverse media, ranging from architecture, textiles, and tiles to paper, metalwork, and woodwork. Yet despite its centuries-old history and popularity in countries from Iran to Spain, scholarship on the form has remained limited and flawed. Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy provides a comprehensive study of the text and its forms, beginning with an explanation of the visual principles and techniques used in its creation. Author Esra Akin-Kivanc explores muthanna's relationship to similar forms of writing in Judaic and Christian contexts, as well as the specifically Islamic contexts within which symmetrically mirrored compositions reached full fruition, were assigned new meanings, and transformed into more complex visual forms. Throughout, Akin-Kivanc imaginatively plays on the implicit relationship between subject and object in muthanna by examining the point of view of the artist, the viewer, and the work of art. In doing so, this study elaborates on the vital links between outward form and inner meaning in Islamic calligraphy.

About the Author

Esra Akin-Kivanc is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of South Florida's School of Art and Art History. She is author of Mustafa Ali's Epic Deeds of Artists: A Critical Edition of the Earliest Ottoman Text about the Calligraphers and Painters of the Islamic World and coauthor of Sinan's Autobiographies: Five Sixteenth-Century Texts.

Reviews

"This book, an important and much-needed contribution to the field of Islamic calligraphy, provides a nuanced and complex study of this enigmatic art form by placing it into a transcultural context and examining it from new vantage points. It is stimulating, carefully thought out, and well documented."-Maryam Ekhtiar, Curator of Islamic Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Muthanna not only makes a welcome intervention in the larger field of the history of calligraphy, but also highlights the specific practice of mirror writing, which has hitherto received almost no attention. The book brings religion and art together in an innovative and meaningful fashion, and Akin-Kivanc is to be commended for her courageous pioneering work."-Emine Fetvaci, Boston University

"A truly groundbreaking study of a little-understood subject, muthanna (mirror writing) in Arabic script. Although all too often discussed as simple decoration, grounded at least in part by an alleged Islamic prohibition of figural imagery, the author shows that muthanna was, in fact, governed by a complex aesthetic and that its roots go back to inscriptions in Greek, Syriac, Samaritan, and Hebrew. A remarkable work of historical, cross-cultural, and aesthetic scholarship, Professor Akin-Kivanc's book will doubtless stand as the go-to source for this distinctive, but much misunderstood, subject."-Howard Crane, The Ohio State University

Book Information
ISBN 9780253049216
Author Esra Akin-Kivanc
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 798g