Why, in Egypt, creatives are returning to calligraphy in their droves

In 1922, King Fuad I established the Khalil Agha School for Arabic Calligraphy in Cairo as part of a broader effort to modernise Egypt. Aside from the school’s role in preserving the practice, institutionalising it was a move to assert Egypt’s cultural sovereignty in the wake of independence. Since then, the school has stood as a symbol of Egypt’s modernisation ambitions and its ongoing struggle for cultural self-determination – a role it continues to play, even as it faces challenges on various fronts. Among them, the rise of new print and digital technologies has steadily eroded the reverence of the very tradition it was built to protect – or has it?

As a profession, calligraphy exemplifies what economist Joseph Schumpeter termed “Creative Destruction” – a phenomenon in which new technologies disrupt existing industries, rendering certain skills obsolete while giving rise to others. Yet, despite the speed, scale, and efficiency that print technology offered, it could not replicate the human rhythm and expressive variability of the calligrapher’s hand. The technology was developed for the Latin alphabet and struggled to accommodate the flow, complexity, and rhythmic nuance of Arabic script. More importantly, they could not sever the deep spiritual, cultural, and emotional bond between Arabic calligraphy and its readers – a relationship that transcends function and flirts with reverence.

The calligrapher emerged to give rise to a form of the script that was worthy of divinity of the Quran. For centuries, calligraphers were counted among the intellectual elite, earning immense cultural, political, and economic power.

The reed against the press

By the end of the 19th century, printing technology had begun to take hold in Egypt, and with it, the power dynamics of visual culture began to shift. Calligraphers found themselves at war, not just with these rapidly evolving technologies but also with the emerging skills they were creating.

Some calligraphers found temporary refuge within state-funded publishing; others pivoted into applied arts, working on advertisements, street signage, cinema, and various forms of print ephemera. This friction with the machine was not all bad, in fact, it catalysed a period of extraordinary output. Calligraphers’ work became ubiquitous – visible across all the visual spectrum of modern Egypt, from the monumental to the mundane, slowly shaping the aesthetic contours of everyday life.

New rivals

Amidst this shifting landscape, other forces were forming. The printing press had birthed new skills that operated alongside the calligraphers in the visual production process. These skills went beyond the calligrapher’s specialties of rendering type. With each technological leap – from the letterpress and dry transfer sheets to computer fonts and everything in between – the calligrapher’s role gradually receded. The graphic artist in particular emerged as a prominent figure, with mastery of image creation and reproduction, and increasingly gained control over visual production.

With every generation, the pursuit of postcolonial identity, the yearning for cultural sovereignty, and the search for visual authenticity resurface – often reinvigorating interest in Arabic calligraphy, especially as technology continues to fall short of capturing its nuanced depth. Throughout the 20th century, graphic artists regularly utilised calligraphers, combining the designer’s expertise in layout with the calligrapher’s command of the Arabic letterform.

Reimagine

Now, the contributions of these two professions to Egypt’s visual culture are undeniable. Together, they created the very world which modern Egyptian designers were born into and shaped by.

In my previous piece, I described the rise of a new aesthetic movement in Egypt that I called Made in Egypt. This movement is shaped by culturally grounded design practices emerging across disciplines.

One of the movement’s manifestations is Hadath Alkhatt (The Calligraphy/Type Event), founded by Ohaila Ahmed, operations lead; Ehab Elhamzawy, typographer and founder of Hebrayer; and Abdelrahman Barakat, architect and Khalil Agha School alumnus. “Our mission,” Barakat tells me, “is to unite calligraphers and designers into one community.”

It launched in its current form in 2024 with a playful Nastaliq-inspired logotype and a visual identity designed by Serious Play, the Cairo-based design studio led by Mahmoud Hassan and Nourhan El Banna. Mahmoud tells me that one of the key challenges was crafting a visual language that could embody the event’s ethos by combining traditional sensibilities with a contemporary interpretation.

Since its launch, the event has drawn both local and international attention, with sponsors like TypeTogether and ILoveTypography as well as the Khalil Agha school, among others. The diverse roster of speakers, from the legendary Khoudair al-Boursaidi (b. 1948), to emerging and established figures in design and type, attracted audiences that doubled between the event’s first two editions.

“People kept asking us if we have more workshops,” Abdelrahman tells me. The community wanted more: more access, more learning, and more spaces for experimentation. In response, one of the event’s components began to sprout into something larger: Werash Alkhatt (The Calligraphy/Type Workshops). Since then the workshops have been growing steadily in scale and ambition, spreading across Egypt, throughout the region, and into international settings.

The workshops as alternative spaces of interaction with both the community and with the Arabic script, are particularly compelling because of the demand they surfaced. They expose a shared desire to reclaim and reintegrate a deep understanding of Arabic calligraphy in modern practices, something that is not only adopted by Serious Play, but many of the design practitioners and studios in Egypt today.

It’s sovereignty, not identity

On the surface, the event and the workshops might seem to centre solely on education and creative exchange. And while this is true, beneath the surface something more intricate is taking shape. An examination of the dynamics at play – who shows up, who organises, who instructs, and what references are used in these workshops – reveals that this is not merely a cultural or professional dialogue. In the quiet rituals of making, listening, gathering, and observing, a culturally grounded mode of discernment is evolving.

Mainstream discourse on Arabic calligraphy and contemporary design have a reductive tendency that frames these pursuits solely through the lens of identity. This tendency too easily substitutes critical inquiry with familiar rhetoric and overlooks the deeper motive at play: the need for sovereignty – sovereignty over form, over narrative, and over the future of how we design, write, and imagine the world.

At its core, these activities are all decolonial acts – not through academic jargon, but through the slow, deliberate unlearning of inherited modes of seeing, selecting, and making while cultivating new ones. Ironically, it is a form of creative destruction – not of industries, but of Western-dominant ways of knowing and making meaning.

* Special thank you to Mrs May Mohamed Said Ibrahim.

Closer Look

For further research and inspiration around this topic, Moe highlights some events in Cairo and work coming out of the city at the moment.

• The Golden Narrative Exhibition at Medrar is definitely worth a visit.

• The Manassat Film Festival has opened its 9th Edition, with a poster designed by Hussein Salem and calligraphy by Mahmoud Alnemr.

• The Calligraphy/type event (third edition) is coming up on 26 September.