An Alif Five Dots Tall — Epoche A2
Last Eid al-Fitr I went with my family to the mosque near our house in Amman. After the prayer I saw a small room with an open door. Six children sat on the carpet with a teacher. They were learning calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing. Each child had a reed pen with a flat, cut end. The teacher dipped his pen and made a small diamond-shaped dot on the paper. Then he made a row of five dots, one on top of the other, like a little ladder. "This is the alif," he said. The alif is the first letter, one straight line. "In our style, a good alif is five dots tall. Not four, not six." A boy asked how to measure the other letters. The teacher smiled and said the dot measures everything: this letter is three dots wide, that curve is four dots deep. The dot comes from the pen itself, so a wide pen writes big letters and a thin pen writes small letters, but the shapes stay the same. I watched for ten minutes. Nobody used a ruler. The pen was the ruler.