Persian or Arab? The “anatomy charts” from the collection of Sami Ibrahim Haddad

To the Editor: We read with interest the articles of Dr. Farid S. Haddad on anatomy charts published in the recent issues of Annals of Saudi Medicine.^1,2 The author presented two anatomy charts and mentioned that parts of the text are in Arabic and others are in Persian. We examined the charts carefully and found several points worthy of mention.

First, all the text is in Persian; no sentence in the chart is in Arabic. The script used for writing the text is Nastalīq, a well-known Persian calligraphy invented by Mīr Alī of Tabrīz (North-West of Iran), the most famous calligrapher of the Timurid period (1402–1502).³ Nastalīq script is traditionally considered the most beautiful Persian script and has almost only been used by Iranians.³ There are, however, many Arabic words in the text, but that is not surprising.

Soon after the time when Islam entered Iran, many Arabic words entered our language, as well as many words taken from English, French, Russian, and others. Some of these words are so familiar to Iranians that many people are not aware they originated from another language. Furthermore, English has not always enjoyed its current position as the lingua franca and the language of science. Previously, this role was played by other languages like French, Arabic, and Greek. As we use English for many of our scientific communications today, previously scientists wrote their articles in Arabic to reach their audience more readily. Avecinna and Rhazes, two well-known Iranian scholars, were among such scientists who wrote many of their books and articles in Arabic for the very same reason. Therefore, although writing an article or chart in Arabic by an Iranian scholar in that era might not be surprising, writing a text in Persian by an Arab was very unlikely. And, that is why we believe that the author of those charts was undoubtedly a Persian and not an Arab.