The web and the word of God

On world Arabic Language Day, Nick Leech talks to Thomas Milo, a linguist and a typographer who is leading the campaigning to get traditional Arabic calligraphy onto the Internet.

The guidebook on Lebanese Arabic written by Thomas Milo for the Dutch military. Courtesy Thomas Milo

How do you place the Quran, the word of God created without distortion or corruption, on to something as inherently unstable and unreliable as the internet?

It is a problem that is giving Thomas Milo, a Dutch typographer, linguist and inventor, the greatest challenge of his long and varied career.

He has been hired by the Omani government to create an online Quran that is not only searchable, but which also conforms to the aesthetic and calligraphic standards of today’s printed Quran while remaining impervious to digital technology’s potentially corrupting effects.

While there may be many thousands of versions of the Quran online at present, none are able to meet all three of these criteria, Mr Milo says.

“Since the policies regarding the integrity of the Quran text raise the stakes, this becomes a very interesting and challenging problem indeed,” says Mr Milo, 63.

“Unless you consider the Quran as something that is flexible and can be tampered with, which is what happens at the moment, then it still hasn’t been put online yet.”

One of the biggest problems is that it is impossible to guarantee that a reader viewing the Quran online is accessing the right text with the original spellings in the correct format.

Mr Milo says there are essentially two ways of putting the Quran on the web.

The first is to find and upload the best possible images. “You might then have a beautiful online Quran but the glitch is that it cannot be searched,” he says.

The other way to put the Quran online is to the employ the fonts, signs and symbols defined by the Unicode system, the effective lingua franca of the Internet, but that would sacrifice the many non-standard and ancient Arabic spellings that appear in the Quran text.

“What is happening now with the files that are disseminated as internet Qurans is that they cannot encode non-standard spellings and so some words are corrected or even replaced,” Mr Milo says.

While they may be purists, the standard that he and Oman’s ministry of awqif and religious affairs are aiming for is far from obscure.

Their model is the Quran that was produced under the auspices of King Fuad I by scholars from Al Azhar university in Cairo, an institution that is recognised as the world seat of Sunni Islamic and Arabic learning.This version of the Quran was printed in 1924, is still recognised as the standard version of the holy book and is the most widely available printed version to this day.

Unfortunately, to produce an online version of the Quran that is searchable using available technologies would mean sacrificing many of the aesthetic and orthographic qualities of the edition that is still recognised as Islam’s standard text.

“You would have an object that is married to the grand tradition of Arabic calligraphy that looks nothing like it should,” Mr Milo says.

“It would also be totally dependent on the operating system of the device you are using, so you cannot guarantee the display of the information that you broadcast.”

Mr Milo has spent much of his career designing Arabic fonts and understands better than anyone the problems this project faces.

“Fonts are unreliable,” he says.

“They sit on your machine, the information floats on the internet and where they meet you have the actual image, but unfortunately what sits on each machine is different.

“Even if the broadcaster has the most delicate selection of typefaces on an iPad, for example, the operating system would simply substitute the fonts for things they consider to be better for the job.”

As far as Mr Milo and the Omani ministry are concerned, this is a far from ideal situation.

Mr Milo may not exactly be a household name but his influence on Arabic text has been significant. Anyone who has used the Arabic version of Microsoft Office has probably used one of his fonts.

He and his team at DecoType – the company he founded in 1985 with his wife, designer Mirjam Somers, and her aircraft engineer brother, Peter Somers – are responsible for two of the most popular calligraphic fonts of Microsoft Office Middle East: DecoType Ruq’ah and DecoType Naskh.

In traditional Arabic calligraphy, Ruq’ah is the cursive script that is used for handwriting. Naskh, which is believed to have been invented by the Abbasid vizier and calligrapher Ibn Muqla in the 10th century, is traditionally used for copying and transcribing texts.

DecoType’s were the first digital versions of both scripts.

Mr Milo has spent much of the past 30 years travelling between his home in Amsterdam and California’s Silicon Valley, working as a consultant for companies such as Adobe and Microsoft.

It was not where his career seemed to be heading in 1976 when, after studying Slavic languages, Turkish and Arabic at university, he became a long-distance lorry driver to practise his new skills.

Mr Milo had wanted to concentrate on his Turkish but because he could speak Arabic, he was posted to Damman, in Saudi Arabia, from where he opened road-haul routes into Yemen.

A few years later, he made a career decision that led to one of the most formative events in his life.

In 1979, when Dutch troops became peacekeepers as part of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, Mr Milo volunteered as an interpreter, completing two tours of duty between 1980 and 1983.

While this brought him into frequent contact with suicide squads and guerrilla fighters, it also led to a commission for a guide to South Lebanese Arabic that became standard issue for all Dutch troops serving in Lebanon.

“I made a description of the border language of South Lebanon and I wanted this to be accompanied by the Arabic script that was used in the area,” Mr Milo says.

“I couldn’t find a supplier who could provide me with the correct solution so I had to make the book in a form that I didn’t like.”

His dissatisfaction, and the inability of printers to accurately replicate the richness and the diversity of Arabic as it is traditionally written, set the course for his subsequent career.

He went from being a linguist and translator to typography and developing software and is now one of the world’s foremost experts on traditional and digital Arabic typographic design.

Mr Milo’s philosophy is that technology should be designed to accommodate Arabic, rather than dictating how Arabic should be designed.

When he started his research in the early 1980s the world of information technology was a very different place.

“To use Arabic on a computer you had to hack into it at that time,” he says.

“There were two hurdles. The first was that there was no established standard for encoding anything other than Latin characters. The second hurdle was to be able to run text in two directions simultaneously on the same line.

“You need to be familiar with the results that you want to accomplish. Not only do you need to be able to stack letters in Arabic, but you need to be able to get the overlaps right because the letter blocks often clamp together.”

Mr Milo and the team at DecoType have also developed Tasmeem, an Arabic desktop publishing tool that enables its user to create digital documents with a level of control and calligraphic freedom normally associated with traditional, hand-rendered manuscripts.

This technology has been used by New York University Press for its new Library of Arabic Literature, a new series of Arabic editions and English translations of key works of classical and premodern Arabic literature funded by a grant from the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute.

It is a project of which Mr Milo is particularly proud.

“It may sound like I take an extreme position but I am merely trying to apply the same logic to Arabic typography that we apply in the West for ourselves, and I merely assume that Arabic script deserves the same treatment,” he says.

“Go for the best historical scripts, mechanise them and use them for literature. That’s what is being done for the Library of Arabic Literature.

“This is an intellectual challenge for me, not a religious one. I’m not even an Arab, but I think this is an important part of world civilisation and world heritage.

“To make the Quran safe on the web, we have to try to develop a different technology and by doing so, in the end, we will hopefully arrive at a new level of perfection in Arabic typography.”