Ibrahim El-Salahi: The meeting of transcendence and tradition

The visionary Sudanese modernist Ibrahim El-Salahi played a significant role in integrating Arab and African art scenes by adapting the forms, formats, and meanings of Arabic calligraphy into his work. Concomitantly, he inspired generations of young artists with his meditative approach to painted imagery and his continued engagement with Muslim metaphysical ideas such as the soul’s passage between life and death. El-Salahi was born on Sept. 5, 1930, in Omdurman, Sudan. Over the course of his career, he served as an art teacher, public servant, and diplomat, and became one of the most renowned artists of the Khartoum School, which is recognized as an important node in both African modernism and the Arab hurufiyya art movement. His work connects to audiences at multiple levels by incorporating elements of Islamic calligraphy—including sound and rhythm as well as visual composition—into contemporary artworks. The artist has described how bodily sensation and spirits guide his process. As he attested in the late 1960s, he considered that process akin to prayers that his community hummed when chanting, mixed with recollections of poetry and the Qur’an, that “seem to come through me and appear on the canvas.”

For El-Salahi, the letter is an alive entity, embodying a spirit of its own. The artist describes his encounters with letters and ghosts in this quote: “[S]ometimes I even had things like ghosts come to me out of the written letter… The letters themselves, they began to talk to you…a bit of [calligraphy] is everywhere around us.” In this context, El-Salahi describes himself as “[breaking] the symbol” of the letter, in which the spirit is broken free. Understanding the aliveness of calligraphy is helpful in identifying the calligraphy in El-Salahi’s artwork, which appear as ghostly skeletal figures. Furthermore, this quality of aliveness points to the activation of multiple senses, beyond sight, in experiencing calligraphy.

As a Muslim, El-Salahi’s spirituality figures into the preparation of creating art. The artist often prays before beginning his process of art making. As he has explained: “I have to come clean outside which leads to a cleanliness within. And then I work.” This process allows the artist to become closer with his creation and to be in conversation with his artwork, which is just as important, if not more important, than the final result.

Above: Ulli Beier, “Ibrahim Salahi,” Black Orpheus, no. 10 (November 1961). UC Berkeley Library collection. Shows, on left: Ibrahim El-Salahi, The Prayer, 1960, oil on masonite, 61.3 × 44.5 cm., now in the Collection of Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth. On right, unidentified painting, c. 1960.

This 1961 issue of Black Orpheus, a literary journal of African and Afro-American literature established in Nigeria by German scholar Ulli Beier, features El-Salahi, highlighting how the artist gradually expanded his work in paint to incorporate Arabic calligraphy and its religious associations. On the left, in a painting titled The Prayer, El-Salahi outlines Arabic text in white pigment to create a composition out of a verse from the Qur’an (Surat Al Imran). On the right, a painting with an unknown title combines haunted imagery—ghostly figures, animals, and vegetal patterns—with allusions to religious learning, including the outline of a Sudanese writing board on which verses from another sura (Surat al-Ikhlas) are written. These artworks appealed to Beier because their obvious connection to popular religion accorded with his notion of African and African-American liberation arts. He featured El-Salahi in numerous publications and exhibitions.

Above, Left: Detail of outer tunic garment (jibba) worn in Sudan in the late 19th century. Plain weave cotton, woven wool, applique embroidery. Right: Wooden writing board from Omdurman, Sudan. Reproduced from Ibrahim El-Salahi, Qabdah min Turāb: Sīrah Dhātīyah (A Handful of Dirt: Autobiography) (Khartoum: Muntada Dal al-Thaqafa, 2012).

El-Salahi includes in his autobiography these two images of Sudanese cultural references found in his life and work. The first is a tunic garment distinguished by scrolled pocket patches and embroidery, worn by members of the Mahdist movement in Sudan who were involved in the struggle against the Ottoman-Egyptian occupation. As part of his turn to local aesthetic precedents in the 1960s, El-Salahi adapts the scrolled outline on plain ground for use in his painterly compositions.

The second is a writing board from the artist’s hometown. Boards such as this are used by students to practice writing Arabic calligraphy and to memorize Qur’anic verses. In the 1960s, the artist used the outline of this kind of writing board in his paintings and drawings.

Above: Ibrahim El-Salahi, Drawings, exh. cat. (Ibadin: Mbari Publications, 1962). UC Berkeley Library collection.

Crowded and busy drawings populate El-Salahi’s early 1960s style, as documented in this publication for the artist's solo exhibition in Mbari, Nigeria. The caption placed beside the figure on the right-hand page invites us into the drawing as a space of imagination, promising “[m]any things to think about.” The body is surrounded by a multitude of figures and intricate patterns. On the left-hand page, more of El Salahi’s skeletal figures crowd the page, split by a line close to the center, which could be interpreted as a tree. El-Salahi reminds us how art and calligraphy interact with the natural world. The drawings evoke a contemplative anxiety, focusing on line and repetition of organic forms.