Muthanna

Categorized as Terms

Muthanna

Esra Akın-Kıvanç

Related Terms:

  • Khatt (calligraphy)
  • Apotropaic (believed to have power to avert evil)
  • Asma-i husna (beautiful names of Allah)

Related Khamseen Videos:

Maryam Ekhtiar, “A Calligraphic Composition by Ismaʿil Jalayir in the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 22 September 2022.

Nancy Micklewright, “Mohamed Zakariya and the Practice of Calligraphy,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 16 November 2023.

References:

Akın-Kıvanç, Esra. Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021.

Eastmond, Anthony, ed. Viewing Inscriptions in the Late Antique and Medieval World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Ekhtiar, Maryam D. How to Read Islamic Calligraphy. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018.

Frembgen, Jürgen Wasim, ed. The Aura of Alif: The Art of Writing in Islam. Munich: Prestel, 2010.

Mackie, Louise W. Symbols of Power: Luxury Textiles from Islamic Lands, 7th–21st Century. Vicenza, Italy: Graphicom, Cleveland Museum of Art, 2015.

Picard-Schmitter, M. –Th. “Scènes d’Apothéose sur des Soieries provenant de Raiy.” Artibus Asiae 14, no. 4 (1951): 306–41.

Roxburgh, David. Traces of the Calligrapher: Islamic Calligraphy in Practice, c. 1600-1900. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2008.

Citation:

Esra Akın-Kıvanç, “Muthanna,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 1 November 2022.

Esra Akın-Kıvanç is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of South Florida’s School of Art and Art History. Her current research focuses on cross-cultural exchanges between Byzantium and Islam as manifested in bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Arabic featured on liturgical objects and architectural surfaces. Akın-Kıvanç has co-authored, with Howard Crane, Sinan’s Autobiographies: Five Sixteenth-Century Texts (Brill: Leiden, 2006), and she is author of Mustafa Âli’s Epic Deeds of Artists: A Critical Edition of the Earliest Ottoman Text about the Calligraphers and Painters of the Islamic World (Brill: Leiden, 2011) and Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Art: History, Theory, and Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).