There’s a news photo of some graffiti on a church in San Antonio here:
Can anyone here read the Arabic (I assume) portion of the graffiti? I don’t read Arabic, but it looks odd to me. Of course, I can barely read graffiti tags in English because they are typically so stylized.
So - baroque Arabic calligraphy, stylized tag, Quran verse, fakey squiggles, what?
It’s highly stylized ornamental Arabic script. It appears to say “Allah akbar muhammad” (God is great /Muhammad), a shortened version of “Allah-u akbar muhammad rasul allah” (God is great /Muhammad is the prophet of God).
In my neighborhood, this kind of decoration (the Arabic part) is sort of the Muslim equivalent of the Jesus fish. It’s a statement of faith, sure, but it also shows up on all sorts of kitschy devotional/decorative items.
Thanks for the explanation.
Here’s a subjective followup question - as far as ‘highly stylized’ goes, would you say that it leans more toward a traditional, formal style like Fraktur or Copperplate Western calligraphy, or more toward a graffiti tag style? Maybe that’s not a good question. How about this: is it stylized like they stylized it >=100 years ago, or stylized like two weeks ago?
Speaking from ignorance, I would expect that there would be such distinctions in Arabic script, but perhaps not… A Google search for “Arabic graffiti” seems to show that there are, but I don’t know the history.
The Arabic part sure looks like it was made with a large stencil which seems odd for graffiti. It would also mean that the vandal could have been someone who didn’t know anything about Arabic other than which side of the stencil is up.
Exactly my thought. It smacks of provocateur.
“No to wall / Islam or die” does seem to be an odd combination of sentiments. It sounds like what a Trump booster * imagines* a liberal/Muslim would say.
Nah stencils being used in graffiti is very common (I’ve been involved in the scene going on 20 years now). Banksy is probably the most well known of those that use stencils.
Arab script done by non-arabs always tends to have something glaringly wrong with it even if they were using a stencil. If Hollywood movies get it wrong almost every time I can’t see how some “false-flag” Trump supporter would get it right especially since people love pointing out misspellings in Trump supporter signs.
It’s equally likely an Arabic speaker who is Pro-Islam wanted to throw in an Anti-Trump slogan to get some more publicity on it. I mean it seems like the only reason we’re seeing it now is because it can be tied into the election and not just be an isolated hate crime.
It is ordinary, traditional in the script form, it is the arrangement that is the highly stylized aspect, and this is also traditional.
I would suppose someone bought a premade stencil template. The angle of the picture makes it hard to tell but it does not seem free handed.
A premade medallion stencil makes that easy enough, the only thing not to get wrong is right side up. So it does not tell us much.
It seems odd to me to combine the wall idea with this - the wall aims at the Mexicans not the muslims. The combination with the ‘islamic’ statement does not go together.
this makes me think indeed it is a provocateur.
I would say it’s like none of the above. Fraktur was a widely used style of script, but no one routinely writes in the style of this graffitti. Copperplate script, likewise, was widely used for documents. On the other hand, this script isn’t something that someone would just dash off in a hurry, which is something I associate with tagging. If I were to compare it to western typography, it’s more like a display font or a monogram - there’s textual content, but the letterforms themselves are intended to be beautiful or eye-catching.
As **Ramira **mentioned, it’s a traditional script form, but the arrangement is distinctive. Historically, many Muslim theologians have held that it’s inappropriate to depict people and animals in artwork. So where Christians might hang up pictures of saints, holy people, the life of Jesus, etc., for inspiration, Muslims often display calligraphic renderings of verses from the Quran, “Allah akbar,” and so on. Stuff like this.