Hurufiyya movement

By combining tradition and modernity, these artists worked towards developing a culture-specific visual language, which instilled a sense of national identity in their respective nation-states when many of these states were shaking off colonial rule and asserting their independence.

[5] The pan-Arab hurufiyya art movement is distinct from the Letterist International, which had an Algerian section founded in Chlef in 1953 by Hadj Mohamed Dahou.

[6] Traditional calligraphic art was bound by strict rules, which, amongst other things, confined it to devotional works and prohibited the representation of humans in manuscripts.

Contemporary hurufiyya artists, however, broke free from these rules, allowing Arabic letters to be deconstructed, altered and included in abstract artworks.

[8] The use of traditional Arabic elements, notably calligraphy, in modern art arose independently in various Islamic states; few of these artists working in this area had knowledge of each other, allowing for different manifestations of hurufiyya to develop in different regions.

[13] Some scholars have suggested that Madiha Omar, who was active in the US and Baghdad from the mid-1940s, was the pioneer of the movement, since she was the first to explore the use of Arabic script in a contemporary art context in the 1940s and exhibited hurufiyya-inspired works in Washington in 1949.

[15] Yet other scholars have suggested that the hurufiyya art movement probably began in North Africa, in the area around Sudan, with the work of Ibrahim el-Salahi,[16] who initially explored Coptic manuscripts, a step that led him to experiment with Arabic calligraphy.

Iraqi painter, Madiha Omar, is recognised as a pioneer of the hurufiyya art movement, having exhibited a number of hurufist-inspired works in Georgetown in Washington as early as 1949.