When Arabic meets kanji: artists bridge Islam and Japan

TOKYO, Japan (MNTV) — Artists from Saudi Arabia and Japan are discovering that Arabic calligraphy and Japanese kanji — the characters, adapted from Chinese, used in Japanese writing — share more than beauty: they share a spiritual discipline, the Wisconsin Muslim Journal reported.

Saudi artist and designer Noha Raheem, fascinated by Japanese scripts, began rendering Arabic letters in a Japanese-inspired style. 

Drawing on Kufic and freestyle Arabic calligraphy, she found that the flexibility of Arabic script lets letters take unfamiliar forms while keeping their meaning. 

She uses traditional Japanese materials — sumi ink, brushes, rice paper, and hanging scrolls — to render Arabic poetry and Quranic verses with an East Asian character.

Japanese master calligrapher Honda Kouichi has spent much of his life on Arabic calligraphy. Born in Tokyo in 1946 and trained in Arabic, he encountered the art while working in the Middle East, later studying under the renowned Turkish calligrapher Hasan Çelebi and receiving an ijaza — a traditional certification authorizing a calligrapher to practice and teach. 

His work pairs the discipline of Arabic script with a Japanese feel for nature and empty space; his piece “Blue Desert,” evoking the Saudi landscape with Quranic words flowing through blue forms, is held in the British Museum.

The fascination Arabic script holds for Japanese students — many drawn to its letters without knowing the language — inspired the founding of the Japan Arabic Calligraphy Association in 2006, which runs classes, exhibitions, and exchanges. 

The journeys of Raheem and Honda, one moving from Arabic toward Japanese aesthetics and the other the reverse, meet on the written line — a reminder, in an age of cultural division, that beauty can cross borders and reveal common ground.