The title of Alain George's book echoes to some extent the Rise of the North Arabic Script by Nabia Abbott, published in 1939, and the comparison between the two results in a telling contrast. The latter was concerned mainly with a text-based approach to the early Arabic script whereas The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy relies primarily on the extant evidence provided by the manuscripts, turning to the sources in order to shed light on some points. The focus is of course somewhat different since George is primarily interested in calligraphy, but he takes into account the general history of the Arabic script in order to put things in perspective. One of the major methodological advances of this book is the way in which palaeography, with codicology, has been used as a tool in the analysis of calligraphy.

Since 1939, the evidence available, either through the description of collections or through illustrations (one thinks of auction catalogues, for instance), has grown tremendously. On the other hand, what George aptly describes as “a largely indistinct mass” of so-called Kufic material has been subjected over the last decades to increasingly precise studies, mainly palaeographic, which begin now to bear fruit. George has put to use the documentation currently available and built a corpus of more than 1,000 pages of early Quranic manuscripts which he analyses methodically. Using “palaeography and codicology as … cornerstones” of his study, George does not neglect Arabic sources, which he uses efficiently in order to understand the history of early calligraphy.

The book is organized in four chapters: “Looking for the origins” (pp. 21–53), “The birth of Kufic” (pp. 55–93), “On calligraphy and proportion” (pp. 95–114) and “Towards the codification of cursive” (pp. 115–46). The period covered extends from the sixth century, the earliest Arabic inscriptions, to the tenth–eleventh century when calligraphy took a different direction. Placing the material in its context also required looking at the other manuscript traditions of the region. In the first chapter, George uses a comparative approach to examine the first developments of the Arabic script (see notably pl. 22–5 and Table 1 on p. 45).

One of the major advances of recent years in this field has been the identification of Umayyad manuscripts representing at least two stages following the hijazi. They are fully integrated into the second chapter of the book, which begins with a short presentation of the “Quran of Amajur”, a ninth-century manuscript that provides a crucial key to the codification of the scripts described as “Kufic” (pp. 56–7; see also A. George, “The geometry of early Qur'anic manuscripts”, Journal of Qur'anic Studies 9/1, 2007, 78–110). The comparison with contemporaneous Umayyad inscriptions and coins demonstrates the conscious effort, supported by the state, to reform the Arabic script (pp. 60–74). Chronology and palaeography have made much headway in recent decades, but the geographical attribution of the manuscripts is still lagging behind. George remains cautious about this point although his comparative approach suggests some interesting leads.

George's major contribution to the study of the early scripts is the identification of a grid governing the proportion of the letters and that of the page. This result, reached empirically by a careful examination of his corpus, led him to investigate the origins of this sophisticated method. In the third chapter of The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy, he sums up his exploration of the philosophical concepts on harmony and proportion in the Antique and Late Antique traditions, with special attention to Plato's Timaeus (pp. 103–5), and their transmission among Syriac and then Arabic authors of the fifth to tenth centuries, noting that direct knowledge of these works is contemporaneous with the rise of calligraphy in the eighth and ninth centuries.

In the final chapter, George tackles the difficult issue of the successors of the so-called Kufic. He tries to follow the various phases of NS, rightly using the important Antinoe inscription (117/735) as a starting point. However, the material is still largely unexplored or inadequately documented. The present writer suspects, for instance, the Niffari manuscript in the Chester Beatty Library (pl. 73) and other copies of the fourth/tenth century showing the same kind of script to be fakes. The development of “cursive” is the last stage of the investigation and George analyses cautiously the contribution of Ibn Muqlah (pp. 134–7) and the historical context in which this script came to the fore (pp. 138–43). The question is difficult and, here again, the material available to the author is still insufficiently published. Significantly enough, illustration is more sparse than in the second chapter. The appendix (pp. 147–61) provides the reader with a simple and very effective introduction to the typology used mainly in the second chapter.

Since the book is targeted at a larger audience than specialists in Arabic palaeography, George kept to the traditional terminology, “Kufic” and “cursive”, “for practical reasons” (p. 19). It is of course convenient, as these names have been in use for a long time and are widely understood. They are, however, inaccurate as far as a scientific approach is concerned and a coherent terminology remains a desideratum in this area of Islamic studies. The bibliography is quite extensive, but George, who pays much attention to the development of research relating to the early Quran manuscripts, fails to include a paper by V.V. Polosin (“Ibn Muqlah and the Qur'anic manuscripts in oblong format”, Mélanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph 59. 2006, 309–17) who speculated on proportions and scripts.

The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy provides a brilliant and magnificently illustrated synthesis of the first four centuries of an art so important in Islamic civilization. Carefully taking into account the evidence and relying first on palaeography and codicology, but also on art history and a deep knowledge of the sources, it pieces together the many pieces of this still incomplete puzzle. Ironically, Sheila Blair's praise of the book on its dust cover sounds like a palinode to her previous critical comments on the contribution of palaeography to manuscript studies (Islamic calligraphy, Edinburgh, 2006, 109–10) and a deserved tribute to George's masterful contribution. It is to be hoped that this pioneering work will be followed by other studies based on a sound methodological approach and contributing to a better understanding of the mushaf during the first centuries of Islam.