The Calligrapher's Secret Review

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The Calligrapher's Secret ReviewSet in Damascus, Syria, from 1931 through 1956, The Calligrapher's Secret is an impressionistic and romantic novel which strolls leisurely, dropping in on first one character and then another, moving back and forth in time and across ethnic, religious, and social groups. Several main characters and families share their lives and problems, and, in the process, convey an intimate picture of life in Damascus, filled with vibrant descriptions of the city, its neighborhoods, and its varied social life. The novel is much more than a series of domestic stories, however. It is also a serious exploration of the issues surrounding Arabic calligraphy, issues so serious that some who want to make Arabic script more modern, so it can accommodate new words from science and philosophy, face death threats and personal attacks by traditionalists. These consider the language of the Quran, the word of God, to be sacred, inviolable, unchanging.
These two focuses of the novel are connected through Hamid Farsi, a calligrapher dedicated to modernizing the Arabic script, even as his personal life, his relationships, and his unsatisfactory marriage to a beautiful young woman are unfolding and entertaining the reader. The complications in these intertwining tales of love, family life, and daily survival seem to occur at random, with the novel sometimes leaping years ahead to foretell endings, then backing up to fill in the blanks. The more intellectual (and more interesting) issues regarding script and calligraphy are almost exclusively the province of Hamid Farsi, and they seem to float on a different plane above most of the many domestic plots of the novel, with a treatise explaining the religious issues about script appearing at the end.
The novel opens in summer, 1957, and Noura, the twenty-year-old wife of Hamid Farsi, one of the most esteemed calligraphers in Damascus, has run away. Backing up to 1942, the novel then reveals her family and life at that time. Her father, Sheikh Rami Arabi, a famous scholar, bemoans the lack of religious feeling among some of his students. Noura's schooling, which she loves, as opposed to the lack of schooling available for a poor Christian boy named Salman, who is taught to read and write by a bright young female friend, emphasizes class differences and the difference in opportunities. Eventually, Noura is married to Hamid Farsi, an older widower, the wedding preparations being particularly interesting in their details, though Noura is miserable in her marriage. When Salman eventually (and coincidentally) gets a job as errand boy for Hamid Farsi, the stage is set for the blossoming of love with Noura, and their eventual running away (which we have known since page three).
At four hundred forty-four pages, this is a long book, and the plot is not really a plot as one may be accustomed to knowing it. Though the subplots are often connected, they are not unified in the traditional sense. Noura and Salman disappear, and nothing more is heard of them for almost a hundred fifty pages. Instead, the novel devolves into an analysis of aspects of Arabic script, the Sunni/Shiite conflicts about language, and conflicts between traditionalists and progressives which have apparently rent the Arab world. If someone believes that the Quran is the word of God and that its language is sacred, does that also mean that no new word can be added to the lexicon even fifteen hundred years later? If the issues raised here in this 1950s setting have not yet been resolved, they may explain why so few academic studies from the Arab world make their way into print in the west--and maybe why they may not make it into print in their own countries. Mary Whipple
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