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For the cultural history of the Islamic World, writing has long been recognized as a highly important form of art, as calligraphy has traditionally held a particular place in the perception of Islamic elites and their artistic practices. The culture of calligraphy was intimately connected with the production of prestigious book manuscripts, but reached a climax in the creation of single-leaf calligraphies that were also highly appreciated by collectors in centres of Islamic culture from the Ottoman Mediterranean to post-Timurid Central Asia, Safavid Iran and Mughal India. At the same time, writing by its very nature fulfilled its age-old functions of encoding verbal language as text.The present volume approaches the variegated aspects of writing, fathoming its ambiguous character between text and image. It contains ten contributions that originated from a conference held at the University of Bamberg in 2019. These studies range from text-image relations in precious manuscripts through the use of Chinese decorated paper for artistic book production, the training of calligraphers and the process of design, to the iconic character of writing in the layout of books, single-leaf works of calligraphy, iconic writing in contemporary art, to more theoretical considerations on aesthetic perception.

The medieval Jazira has still to offer a multitude of topics for research. As a crossroads in which artistic currents from different regions met, it is unique in the history of the Near East, and at the same time, as a cultural landscape in which different traditions were worked into a dense fabric of material expressions, it is also characteristic of the history of this larger region. There will certainly be more to be discovered in and about this region that can throw light on its history and culture.

Applying different methods to a broad range of sources, this volume attempts to transcend the limits between disciplines of Oriental Studies in twenty articles dedicated to the scholar Heinz Gaube. Focusing on cultural connections between the Arab and the Iranian world, its geographical scope ranges from the Nile to the Syr-Darya. Covering a chronological span from pre-Islamic times to the present, the articles deal with different aspects of cultural history in the Islamic East.