The buildings of the Fatimid period in Cairo (358/969–567/1171) are notable for their extensive use of Arabic inscriptions that decorate both exteriors and interiors. Carved in stone or cut in plaster, they employ a distinctive angular script embellished with leaves and tendrils that is often known as ‘foliated’ or ‘floriated’ Kufic. Scholars have long been interested in these inscriptions: as early as 1889, the Swiss epigrapher Max van Berchem (1863–1921) published an article on the inscriptions of the Mashhad al-Juyushi, a Fatimid structure on the Muqattam overlooking Cairo, followed by a series of articles on Fatimid architectural inscriptions, culminating in the first volume of his monumental Matériaux pour un Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum (MCIA). Gaston Wiet (1887–1971) continued van Berchem’s work studying the content of Fatimid inscriptions in his volume of the MCIA. Meanwhile the Swiss epigrapher Samuel Flury (1874–1935), who had also worked under van Berchem and was an accomplished artist, turned to the stylistic development of Fatimid inscriptions and perfected the system of drawing tables of individual letter forms to analyse script. The inscriptions on Fatimid buildings in Cairo also inspired my own work on early Fatimid architecture in the 1970s and 1980s and led Caroline Williams to publish two articles connecting inscribed buildings to the veneration of saints in the period.

In her 1998 book, Writing Signs: The Fatimid Public Text, the late Irene Bierman took the study of Fatimid inscriptions in a more theoretical direction. In it, she argued that the Fatimid period in Egypt marked a significant change in the ways that authority used writing, moving it from the interiors of buildings to their exteriors in order to address group audiences in public spaces. She noted that the Fatimids ‘made writing a significant public art’ (p. 1), ‘accessible to the whole membership of the society, ruling and ruled, traders, servants, foreigners, Muslims, Jews, Christians, men, and women’ (p. 4). She wrote that previously, however, ‘those in authority [had] displayed writing in public spaces in a limited fashion, placing [inscriptions] at urban thresholds and on lintels over the entrances of some major buildings’ (p. 3). ‘Before the changes initiated by the Fatimids most officially sponsored writing addressed to a group audience was placed inside sectarian spaces. Moreover, even with that space, writing was subordinate in visual importance to other signs of power displayed there.’ (p. 8).