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Digitizing historical Arabic typography: Bulaq Press contributions

Numérisation de la typographie arabe historique : la contribution de l’imprimerie de Boulaq
«رقمنة أساليب الطباعة التاريخية: إسهامات «مطبعة بولاق
Ahmed Mansour et Mohamed Hassan
p. 32-39

Résumés

On sait que divers peuples du monde musulman ont adopté et adapté un alphabet arabe pour leur écriture d’origine. Ces populations ont remplacé leur écriture originale par une version adaptée de l’écriture arabe. C’est pourquoi aujourd’hui plusieurs langues sont actuellement écrites en utilisant l’alphabet arabe, comme le persan (Iran), le pachto, le dari (Afghanistan), l'ourdou (Inde, Pakistan), le javanais (Indonésie), le malais (Malaisie), le kurde (Irak) et le Ouïgour (Chine). Cette variété de langues utilise différents styles de calligraphie arabe tels que le naskh, le ruqa, le nastaliq (farsi), le diwani et le coufique carré. L’imprimerie de Boulaq a joué un rôle essentiel dans la promotion de l'esprit d'érudition et la diffusion des connaissances en Égypte et au Proche-Orient au cours des xixe et xxe siècles. Les changements dans la production des livres en Égypte après 1850 ont été marqués par l'évolution de la technologie graphique et l'utilisation de différentes langues dans ses productions imprimées : l'arabe, le turc et le persan. En outre, l’imprimerie de Boulaq a réussi à être un pionnier dans le monde islamique en imprimant le Coran pendant le règne du roi Fouad (1923). En 2012-2013, le Centre d'écriture et de script de la Bibliotheca Alexandrina a numérisé la police de caractères naskh du Coran de l’imprimerie de Boulaq et l’a l'enregistré sur un CD. Cependant, d'autres polices de caractères peuvent être numérisées grâce à une enquête sur les publications de l’imprimerie de Boulaq. Notre article présente un projet multidisciplinaire qui étudie l'évolution des polices de caractères de l’imprimerie de Boulaq, puis explique la méthodologie avec laquelle la police de caractères du Coran de l’imprimerie de Boulaq a été numérisée.

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Introduction1

  • 1 I would like to thank Thomas Milo for reading this paper. In addition, I am grateful for William J (...)

1The Bulaq Press played an essential role in promoting the spirit of scholarship and knowledge dissemination in Egypt and the Near East during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bulaq Press published old and rare Arabic manuscript books, as well as books in other eastern languages such as Persian and Turkish. Thus, printing drew attention to different knowledge fields, especially those works that were translated by the Egyptian scholar Rafa‘a Al Tahtawy during the 1840s. Several factors came together to formulate the new intellectual character of the Egyptian society, and the number of private schools and the emergence of female education was increased. Public journals like Al-Waqae al-Masriya and private ones, like Wady el-Nil were freely established to articulate the opinions of the emerging cultural and political sectors.

2The publications of Bulaq Press showed a good degree of accurate design and print quality – for example, in the well-designed typefaces which were used, and furthermore, in the biographical elements of publication, which met the expectations of the readership. However, a need to follow the development of the Bulaq press typefaces is still needed to understand their historical evolution, and thus the ability to preserve them. This paper aims to suggest a multidisciplinary historical and typographical approach that investigates the evolution of Bulaq Press typefaces, then to explain the methodology according to which Bulaq Press typeface was digitized, and finally to initiate a multidisciplinary collaboration to achieve its aim.

Short history

3The Bulaq Press was Egypt’s first official, governmental and industrial printing house. It came to be at the heart of an important project of modernizing Egypt under the rule of Mohamed Ali. It is also believed that it helped forming a quantitative cultural leap for Egyptian society, and the Arab region.

  • 2 al-Masâbikî was born at the beginning of the 19th century. His family moved from Syria to Egypt, a (...)
  • 3 Recently Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu offered a new opinion, suggesting that the Arabic-Italian dictionary (...)
  • 4 To read more about the history of Bulaq Press, cf. ‘Azab, Manṣûr 2005; Mansour 2008: p. 287-315.

4In 1815, Mohamed Ali initiated the process of bringing the art of printing to Egypt by sending a group of Egyptian students on scholarships to Milano, headed by Nicole al-Masâbikî,2 to study type founding and printing. Mohamed Ali also ordered three presses from Milan – along with the necessary supplies of paper and ink from Leghorn (Livorno) and Trieste. Upon his return to Egypt, Masâbikî was made technical director of the nascent Bulaq Press, working under ‘Uthmân Nûr al-Dîn. In 1822, the first publication,3 which is an Italian-Arabic dictionary, came to light. The publishing of this dictionary reflects the vision of Mohamed Ali to let the Egyptian people learn foreign languages and open itself to the world.4

Development of Bulaq typefaces

5The first reference to the typefaces of Bulaq Press was that of the traveler Giovanni Battista Brocchi who mentioned in his diaries from 11 December 1822 “Masabki (sic?) returned to his country with the necessary knowledge, he gave hand to the work, and primarily he was busy with setting up an assortment of Arab and Turkish typefaces, and to teach people the art of printing. In addition to the Arab and Turkish typefaces, there were Italian and Greek typefaces, as well. These (?) were made in Milan. The Arabic typefaces were of three types, and the Italians were of two: the Silvio and the Filisofia (with its cursive set) (Brocchi 1841: 172-173).

6The second reference to the typefaces of Bulaq press was that of Perron in his letter to Mohl (Perron 1843: 5-61). We understand from their correspondence that the first typefaces of the Bulaq Press were brought from Italy to Egypt, and were not cast in Egypt. Four types of typfaces were used in the early stages of Bulaq Press: Arabic, Turkish, Italian, and Greek. It is not unusual to find Arabic and Turkish typefaces in the early publications of Bulaq Press (Radwan 1953: 88). These typefaces consisted of naskh in three different sizes: large for titles, middle for the body of the text, and small for footnotes. The three sizes are to be found in “Kitab fi Senaet el-Harir (The Industry of Silk-Dying). Yet, these typefaces were not of high quality or conforming with the Arabic script grammar and aesthetics.

7Therefore, there was a need for typefaces that respected the rules of grammar for Arabic script and that facilitated the printing process in the press (Heyworth-Dunne 1940: 330). We should refer to two examples: the Istanbul Press and the Bulaq Press.

8On one hand, in the context of Ottoman culture, it was unthinkable that a mere typographer would be in the position to produce his own version of Arabic script. Yet, Mühendisoğlu (1810-1891) modelled his typography on the handwriting of Kazi Asker (Supreme Judge) Mustafa İzzet Efendi (1801-1876), who ranked among the viziers or ministers of the Ottoman state (Milo 2002: 122). This adaptation by Mühendisoğlu of İzzet Efendi’s calligraphy is the starting point of all later Arabic naskh typefaces. The typeface was extremely sophisticated graphically, as it was designed to follow all the graphic rules of naskh typefaces in the tradition of the copyists, who were the professional book producers before the advent of typography (Milo 2002: 123).

  • 5 To read more about the historical development and early printed book in nasta‘liq in Europe, see: (...)

9On the other hand, in Egypt, Mohamed Ali issued a formal order to employ the famous Persian Mirzâ Sanglâḵ to design the new typefaces for the press (see infra). He designed two styles: one in naskh typeface. It was used for most of the printed books. The second in nastaliq typeface. The first book to be printed in nastaliq type was the Persian-language Golestan (Rose Garden) in 1833-1834 (Izadpanah 2018: 87-125). However, there were also successful examples in Europe of nastaliq printed books.5

10In 1867 and 1873, the Bulaq Press participated in two international printing exhibitions (Paris and Vienna, respectively), and on the occasion of the Vienna exihibition, five typefaces used at the Bulaq Press were exhibited:

  • Old Arabic typefaces that were used since the establishment of Bulaq Press;
  • New Arabic Typefaces that were set by Hussein Hosny in 1872;
  • Arabic-Farsi big-size typeface;
  • Arabic-Farsi middle-size typeface;
  • Arabic-Farsi small-size typeface.

Calligraphers and typesetters

11As mentioned above, Mohamed Ali was keen to keep the Bulaq Press as a benchmark in the printing industry, so he employed Mirzâ Sanglâḵ to prepare two typefaces: naskh and nastaliq.

12Sanglâḵ or Mirzâ Moḥammad-ʿali Ḵorâsâni is a celebrated calligrapher and stone carver of the 19th century, as well as a poet and author. According to the preface (dibâča) to his Takerat al-aṭṭâin, Sanglâḵ lived as a dervish and spent much of his time traveling, with long sojourns in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. He also traveled to Central Asia, Afghanistan and India, where he met with and instructed many calligraphers, gaining a considerable following as a result. He left behind numerous examples of his calligraphy that he produced during these trips.

13Mirzâ Sanglâḵ was a master of the nastaliq and šekasta scripts. He is the author of a number of other epigraphic works in nastaliq script, several of which were dedicated to the Mohamed-Ali Pasha Mosque in Cairo. His major literary achievement is Emtehân al-fozalâ’, also known as Tadkerat al-kattâtin, a two-volume biographical dictionary of calligraphers written in a bombastic style (Ekhtiar 2008).

14When analyzing the calligraphic style of Sanglakh, it is apparent that he depended on the division of the writing surface into three horizontal registers. The middle register is bigger than the two others, because it was allocated for writing Quranic verses. The upper and lower registers are divided into hemistiches, separated by oval spaces (Abdelhafiz 2000: 395).

  • 6 Meaning “one third”, because the smallest width of the letter is one third of the widest part.

15In the meantime, a century later, a famous calligrapher and typesetter named Mohamed Bek Ja‘far could prepared a new typeface for Bulaq Press. He achieved a great extent of excellence in calligraphy, and in particular in the thuluth6 script, as well as in naskh and ruq’a, and he had a great impact in the world of calligraphy, as he wrote most of the sign streets that bear the names of streets in Egypt in his magnificent thuluth handwriting style.

16Meanwhile, the most important accomplishment by calligrapher Mohamed Bek Ja‘far (Beğ-Bey) was the creation of a new typeface for Bulaq press, which represented the finest typeface ever created and witnessed by the Arab world. The Ja‘far typeface was founded in 1906. Its number was limited to 406 characters.

17This typeface subsequently became the basis for the printed version of King Fuad’s Quran, the first printed copy of the Quran in the Arab and Islamic world, which was itself the basis used to write the Quran volume issued by the Survey Authority of Egypt. This copy was printed afterwards more than once, and at its end there was always added a statement such as this: “This Quran was, with the grace of God Almighty, printed at the Press of the Egyptian Ministry of Endowment, and its clichés were adapted from the Quran edition printed by the Egyptian Survey Authority for the National Library in the year 1371 AH / 1952 AD. It was fully accomplished in the beginning of the Holy month of Shaaban in the year 1378 AH / February 1959 AD”. Calligrapher Mohamed Bek Ja’far passed away in the year 1916 (Mansour 2018).

Preservation and digitization of Bulaq Press heritage

  • 7 Associate professor of practice in the Department of the Arts and founder of AUC’s graphic design (...)

18With the rise of the 21st century, there was a growing appeal to revive the heritage of printing in the Arab world. Technological advances are also producing new possibilities for streamlined font creation. In addition, Bahia Shehab7 reported that in spite of a rich artistic history, Arabic script has had difficulty transitioning into a digital format for use in graphic design. Currently, there are around 500 Arabic fonts, compared to more than 72,000 fonts and counting in Latin script.

19Khaled Hosny reported that “the distinct qualities of written Arabic are rooted in calligraphy”. In the centuries when Latin typefaces were blossoming, Arabic printing was comparatively neglected. Foundries of the twentieth century developed just a few dozen Arabic typefaces compared to the many hundreds of Latin designs. The challenge of Arabic type design continued into the digital age. The limited collection of Arabic fonts included in early desktop computers and web browsers were dull and clumsy—sometimes missing characters and often riddled with errors. As the Arab-speaking world came online, this gap in type design became even more conspicuous, and people responded by inventing an ad hoc vernacular, transliterating Latin to Arabic in emails, chats, and text messages; for example, “3” would be used to represent “ع”; and عين would be written as “3ain,” instead of the more formal transliteration of “cain.”

20Furthermore, it was important to revive the Arabic script in the machine and digital age as it fell behind Latin during the Ottoman era, as the Ottomans continued to employ calligraphers to handwrite documents, while Western societies transitioned to the printing press. When the digital revolution began, it was easy for European languages to adjust, while Arabic had never truly adapted to the printing press in the first place, so it was poorly equipped for the digital world.

21More than decade ago, the Arab world had no choice but to read and write digital text in inadequate, oversimplified web fonts. Thus, the Bulaq Press represents a surviving example of this heritage. Its publications showed a spirit of preserving the aesthetics of Arabic calligraphy. There have been some successful attempts to trace back the Arabic typeface that was used at Bulaq Press. The first font was published by DecoType (Thomas Milo and his teamwork). The beginning of Decotype in the domain of typography is attributed to Thomas Milo’s experience in comparative linguistics. Decotype produced the Emiri font which is a meticulous reconstruction of the landmark font of the Bulaq printing house in Cairo. It makes it possible to create unicode-based searchable Quran text with the familiar appearance of today’s printed editions. These qualities make Emiri particularly effective for literary productions. Decotype work was based on the original Quran of King Fouad (1923/1924) (Nemeth 2014: 410-422).

22The other project is the Amiri project8 accomplished by Khaled Hosny. Amiri project aims at the revival of the aesthetics and traditions of Arabic typesetting, and adapting it to the era of digital typesetting, in a publicly available form. According to Hosny, the uniqueness of this typeface comes from its superb balance between the beauty of naskh script on the one hand, and the constraints and requirements of elegant typography on the other. The Writing and Scripts Center was happy to collaborate with Khaled in his project, by giving him permission to investigate Mohamed Bek Ja’far typefaces which are conserved in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Bulaq Press Quranic font

23The second project was accomplished by the Writing and Scripts Center in collaboration with the Center for the Manuscript Editing in Cairo. The two centers managed to digitize the Bulaq Press Quran typeface in 2012-2013, to be the first digitized heritage font.

24The Holy Quran was printed in the Bulaq Press in two different sizes. The project resulted in a CD that is loaded with the typeface as a setup application (fig. 1). It is based mainly on tracing back and drawing the typeface of Bulaq Press from the Quran volume that was printed in the press, along with the use of Mohamed Jafaar typefaces conserved in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to complete it (Mansour 2018).

Figure 1. The Bulaq Press Quranic font (CD Cover)

Figure 1. The Bulaq Press Quranic font (CD Cover)

25This project comes as part of a larger context of Bibliotheca Alexandrina's efforts in preserving the heritage of the history of printing in Egypt and its related subjects, i.e. the Arabic scripts and font. It is important to encourage the preservation of Arabic scripts in the digital environment since there are badly adopted digital Arabic fonts.

26The Bulaq Press Quranic font is an application that meets a lot of supplementary needs that are not supported by the engine entitled USP10.DLL. The Bulaq font application supports Arabic characters and symbols in the sixth version of the Unicode 1 standard. In terms of encoding, the logic of Arabic is no different from any other alphabetic script; hence the real challenge of the computer age is not the encoding of Arabic but its visual representation: the development of digital typography that leaves the graphical structure of the script intact (Milo 2008: 494-515). Thus, this font is suitable to write any language that uses Arabic characters and is supported by Unicode, such as Kurdish, Persian and Urdu, Pashto, Malay, and Hausa.

27The font was extremely sophisticated graphically, as it was designed to follow all the traditional/grammar rules of naskh script that were used in the professional book printing industry. The shaping of Arabic script was taken into consideration, because it is governed by a set of rules: practicality – such as legibility – and elegance, as they were originally laid down by people who rank among the world’s greatest graphic artists.

Conclusion

28The liberation of Arabic scripts from handwriting opened up new creative and innovative possibilities to get new Arabic metal typefaces. The technological advances could improve the Arabic scripts in the age of machine, and by consequence in the digital era.

29The current paper dealt with historical and heritage typefaces that could recall from the past. The utmost phase in digitizing a heritage font is to understand the historical context in which these fonts were created. Thus, I consider that this step was important to design a road map to trace back the naskh typeface of the Bulaq Press. The first step, as mentioned above, is to comprehend the history of Bulaq Press typefaces: What were the typefaces used, when had they been used, how they had been developed, and finally what are the best examples of these typefaces? The second step was to specify the needed books that will be scanned in order to complete the whole font map, taking into consideration the different character ligatures. Next comes the OCR phase, drawing and cleaning steps, followed by the digitization step. The Bulaq Press Quranic font included only the naskh typeface; however, it would be useful to digitize the farsi and nastaliq typefaces also, based on the BA’s collection of Bulaq Press publications which will help to preserve our typography history.

30The non-Latin scripts were a marginal aspect of type businesses throughout the twenties century. Since the introduction of movable type with its initial copying of manuscripts forms to the beginnings of mechanical composition and the reproduction of historical foundry type on the new machines, aesthetics were initially derived from the typefaces. Therefore, I do think that it is reasonable for commercial companies and research centers to jump on this opportunity, because Arabic is the third script in use in the world after Latin and Chinese. It is used by nearly 380 million people, from Morocco to Iraq, and from Iraq to the edges of India. All these people use the Arabic script for their language.

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Bibliographie

Abdelhafiz M., 2000, Dur al-Jaliyat Al-Ajnabiya wal ‘arabia fil al-Hayat al-Fania fi Misr fel Karnayn al-Tase‘shar wal ‘eshren, Unpublished Ph.D. Diss, Cairo university.

Azab Kh., Mansûr A., 2005, Matba‘at Bûlâq, Alexandria: BA.

Brocchi G., 1841, Giornale delle osservazioni fatte ne' viaggi in Egitto, nella Siria e nella Nubia da G. B. Brocchi. Viaggio da Trieste al Cairo anno 1822, Bassano: Presso A. Roberti tip. ed editore.

Ekhtiar M., 2008, “Sanglâḵ, Moḥammad-‘ali”, Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, URL: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/sanglakh, consulted on 09/10/2016.

Heyworth-Dunne J., 1940, “Printing and Translations under Muhammad ‘Alî of Egypt: The Foundation of Modern Arabic”, The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 3, p. 325-349.

İhsanoğlu E., 2012, The Turks in Egypt and Their Cultural Legacy, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.

Izadpanah B., 2018, “Early Persian Printing and Typefounding in Europe”, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, no. 29, p. 87-125.

Mansour A., 2018, “The Role of the Writing and Scripts in the Dissemination of Quranic Computer Fonts: The Bulaq Press Quranic Font as a Model”, in Mansour A., Memory of Printing and Publishing in the Middle East, Alexandria, BA, p. 51-72.

Mansour A., 2013, “The Bulaq Press at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina”, in G. Roper, Historical Aspects of Printing and Publishing in Languages of the Middle East, Papers from the Symposium at the University of Leipzig, September 2008, Islamic Manuscripts and Books 4, Brill, p. 287-315.

Milo T., 2002, “Arabic script and typography, a brief historical overview”, in Berry, J.D. (ed.), Language Culture Type, International type design in the age of Unicode, New York: ATypI and Graphis, p. 112-127.

Milo T., 2008, “Computing and the Qur’an: Some caveats”, in Groß M., Ohlig K., Schlaglichter (eds): Die beiden ersten islamischen Jahrhunderte, Berlin: Verlag Hans Schiler, p. 494-515.

Perron A., 1843, Lettre sur les écoles et l’imprimerie du pacha d'Égypte, Journal Asiatique 4, vol.  2, lettre 18, p. 5-61.

Radwan A., 1953, Târîkh Matba’at Bulaq, 2 vol., Cairo: Al-Matba al-Amiriyah.

Sabat Kh., 1966, Târîkh al-tibâ‘a fî al-šarq al-‘Arabî, Cairo: Dar al-Maaref.

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Notes

1 I would like to thank Thomas Milo for reading this paper. In addition, I am grateful for William Joy for proofreading the English language of the paper.

2 al-Masâbikî was born at the beginning of the 19th century. His family moved from Syria to Egypt, and settled in Rawḍa Island in Cairo. He was an intelligent and open-minded young man, and in 1815 he was selected by Mohamed Ali for a state scholarship to Milan to learn the principles of printing. cf. Sabat 1966: 148-150.

3 Recently Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu offered a new opinion, suggesting that the Arabic-Italian dictionary was one of the first printed books. See: İhsanoğlu 2012: 339-340.

4 To read more about the history of Bulaq Press, cf. ‘Azab, Manṣûr 2005; Mansour 2008: p. 287-315.

5 To read more about the historical development and early printed book in nasta‘liq in Europe, see: (Izadpanah 2018: 87-125).

6 Meaning “one third”, because the smallest width of the letter is one third of the widest part.

7 Associate professor of practice in the Department of the Arts and founder of AUC’s graphic design program at AUC.

8 http://www.amirifont.org, the name infringes on Emiri.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1. The Bulaq Press Quranic font (CD Cover)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ema/docannexe/image/13151/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 345k
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Pour citer cet article

Référence papier

Ahmed Mansour et Mohamed Hassan, « Digitizing historical Arabic typography: Bulaq Press contributions »Égypte/Monde arabe, 22 | 2020, 32-39.

Référence électronique

Ahmed Mansour et Mohamed Hassan, « Digitizing historical Arabic typography: Bulaq Press contributions »Égypte/Monde arabe [En ligne], 22 | 2020, mis en ligne le 03 janvier 2022, consulté le 30 mars 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ema/13151 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ema.13151

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Auteurs

Ahmed Mansour

Dr Ahmed Mansour is Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s Writing and Scripts Center. He is an Egyptologist by study, researcher in the history of Arabic printing and in the history of writing by work and research. He published, in collaboration with Dr Khaled Azab, The Bulaq Press monograph which relates the history of Egypt’s first government-owned printing house for which they were awarded the Incentive State Award in Social Science in 2008. He was also the recipient, in 2006, of an award from the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development for the best translated book from French into Arabic: Histoire de l’écriture de l’idéogramme au multimédia. In 2008, he co-published a book entitled The Arabic Printed Book: From Origins to Bulaq Press. From 2018-2020 he has been officially nominated by Bibliotheca Alexandrina to be a founder and a board member of the International Association of Printing Museums (IAPM) in Cheongju, South Korea.

Mohamed Hassan

Dr Mohamed Hassan, is Senior Researcher at Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s Writing and Scripts Center. He is the co-author of the book Diwan of Arabic Calligraphy in Egypt during the Muhammed Ali Dynasty and the author of El Ameid’s Biography-The Calligrapher Sayed Ibrahim. In addition, he is an instructor of Documents and Manuscripts Calligraphy in Faculty of Arts, Alexandria university, and The Arabic Research and Study Institute affiliated to The Arab League.

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