By the One who, if He wished, would not have created separation,
Even if you are absent from my eyes, you are not absent from my heart.
Longing deceives me into thinking you are near,
As if I am conversing with you closely, though you are not close to me.
Abuʾl-ʿAtahiya (748–825 or 826)
A hemistich (half verse) from a short poem by the ʿAbbasid-era poet known as Abuʾl-ʿAtahiya ‘Father of Idiotic Ways’ was selected by contemporary calligrapher Mouneer Al-Shaarani as the basis for a startling composition that plays with the forms of early Arabic scripts and poetic notation, reshaping them into both an abstract and a figurative composition. The weight of the composition is balanced between the round letters nūn on the right with their central, red dot and yāʾ on the left, the only letters that Al-Shaarani permits the use of line variation—thinning where the pen would traditionally lift from the page. The yāʾ provides the rhyming syllable, ʿaynī ‘my eye’, qalbī, ‘my heart’ in the second and fourth lines, interspersed with the more compressed word ghibta ‘out’ or ‘absent’. The final four words of each line has its own encoding ‘absent eye, absent heart’ mitigated by the negating word mā with its elongated alif embracing the three upper lines, separating the experience of presence from seeing and from feeling. The first line of the quatrain above, outside of Al-Shaarani’s composition, suggests that the separation between the two was an intentional act of Allah’s creation, resulting in a need for struggle to reach an understanding of presence and absence in relation to a beloved and to the divine. The two dotted orbs in the first lines to the right may suggest a pair of eyes, whereas the sequence of paired dots in the lower left composition seem to give way to the rhythmic lub-dub (daq daq in Arabic) of the heart.
