As exposed before, the first reform of the Arabic script took place in the tenth century by the calligrapher Abū ‘Alī ibn Muqlah. He believed that the establishment of a script model would help unify and improve the quality of cursive calligraphic styles.
In the twentieth century, newspaper design demanded a simplified form of the script to fit technical limitations. Linotype, as seen above, took the initiative to solve the situation. Simplified Arabic solutions for Linotype machines were also adapted to the phototypesetting systems. Although this solution implies a new grammar of the script, it was a provisional solution regarding technology facilities. Anyway, it raised a problem that would later gave rise to different attempts of reform the Arabic script.
With the independence of all Arab states that were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and the consequent modernisation of many of them, there was a need to seek solutions to represent some of the sounds not represented in its writing system. The need for a reform was based, in part, on the difficulty of representing foreign words. The Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo was commissioned to study the issue. In 1936, according to the first reform, it decided to use new diacritics above or below certain letters to represent non-Arabic sounds: three dots on the letter Fāh to represent the sound V, or two dots under the letter Gīm to represent the sound G, in Geneva, for example (Jürg Hunziker, 1985).
Two years later, in 1938, the Academy decided to carry out a more far-reaching reforms intended to alphabetise the Arab world by providing easier access to reading and writing. After rejecting several proposals, in 1945 they organised a call for ideas which got two hundred submissions. All proposals were studied, but in 1952 the committee decided to declare the competition void for having nothing satisfactory. In 1955 the committee decided to limit the simplification of the Arabic script to its use on typewriters and printing. They agreed on the use of vocalisation marks in the primary books to facilitate the learning of reading. In 1959 thirty five projects were presented and rejected again (Jürg Hunziker, 1985).
The government of Morocco decided to initiate its own reform taking into account the reforms of Professor Lakhdar Ghazal (1917-2008). The system
developed by Professor Lakhdar was named ASV–Codar (Arabe Standard Voyelleé – Codage Arabe). Although it had been rejected by the Cairo Academy in 1959, the Moroccan government supported the development of the project and encouraged
the establishment of the Institut d’Etudes et de Recherches pour l’Arabisation at the Mohamed V University in 1960, with the main task of adapting the Arabic language to modern uses, both in the area of linguistics and in its script (Jürg Hunziker, 1985). The aim of the typeface was to make the Arabic type useful and easy in all modern media (Zoghbi, 2007). As Zoghbi states, the reason why
ASV-Codar was developed was that “unlike the previously proposals, it solved the
technical problem of simplifying the script and at the same time respected the spirit of the Arabic script. Consequently, this project was a social and technolog- ical achievement” (Zoghbi, 2007). In 1978, Monotype released Monotype Ghazal (Regular and Bold), a renamed version of Linotype ASV-Codar and designed by Ahmed Lakhdar Ghazal [Fig. 26]. According to Wolfgang Hartmann, the manager of Bauer Types, they used to fund ASV-Codar since they owned the rights for the metal version. Hartmann points out that the particularity of ASV-Codar was that it had an inferior number of letters compared with the normal Arabic set. So, less matrices and types were needed.5ASV-Codar was produced into digital in 1999 at
the Linotype Font foundry in two weights, light and bold, and included Palatino as its Latin companion. Both Linotype and Monotype distribute digital versions of the same typeface under different names. It seems that this typeface has a strong presence in Lakhdar’s country, since ASV-Codar (or Monotype Ghazal) has been used in traffic signals all over Morocco.
It is interesting to notice how close the idea and design of Lakhdar’s ASV-Codar is from an early Spanish type design experiment published in the Cultura Española magazine in an article named ‘New Arabic typography’ (Nueva tipografía Árabe)6
written by the arabist Julián Ribera and the engineer Antonio Prieto y Vives, in 1909. They registered a patent for a ‘new Arabic type system’ consisting of a set of twenty-four punches and a simplified case, which saved half the time when composing, correcting and distributing type, moreover the system allowed double the number of lines of text to be set in a page than traditional typefaces (Giménez Reíllo, 2012b). These typefaces were used in Roque Chabás’ second edition of the 1566 Doctrina cristiana en lengua arábiga y castellana para la intrucción de los moriscos del
Ilustrísimo Sr. D. Martín de Ayala (Valencia, 1911). The typefaces were founded at the
Richard Gans foundry (Giménez Reíllo, 2012b) and were mainly used in the Cultura
Española magazine. In September 1945 a fire destroyed the printing office where
the magazine used to be printed together with the types. Ten years later, Lakhdar Ghazal registered a patent, both in Morocco and Spain, under the name ‘Improve- ments of Arabic printing types’ [Fig. 41]. According to Giménez Reíllo’s article there are lots of coincidences with the proposal of Arabic reform presented by Ribera and
5 Interview with Wolfgang Hartmann, the manager of Bauer Types and Neufville foundry (March, 2013) and personal communication from December 2012 to January 2013.
6 Ribera, Julián & Prieto, Antonio (1909), ‘Nueva tipografía Árabe’, in Cultura Española, 15, pp. 759–764 (cited in Giménez Reíllo, 2012b).
Prieto in 1909.7 Although this is far from the focus of this practice-based research,
the possible copy or influences of Ribera and Prieto’s improvements on Lakhdar ‘invention’ could well be an interesting topic for a future investigation.
In spite of the tragic final of Ribera and Prieto’s Arabic font, they deserve the right to be considered among the first pioneers at looking for a simplified solution for Arabic text composition with movable typefaces.
All those efforts made in order to reform Arabic script have not led to a definitive conclusion. In fact, progress on the technological issues has changed the situation. With the new digital formats, data storage is no longer a problem when it comes to maintaining the Arabic script in its traditional form. Since font formats can also include all diacritics and vocalisation marks together with a huge quantity of glyphs, simplified Arabic is not necessary any more. It has been proven as a technological issue that now has been overcome.