Sacred words in secular spaces: calligraphy, ornament, and the negotiation of religious visibility in Indonesia

Noval Maliki

doi:10.67490/ijls.v1i3.1019

Authors

Noval Maliki Institut Studi Islam Fahmina Cirebon Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.67490/ijls.v1i3.1019

Keywords:

Arabic calligraphy, Indonesia, Islamic ornament, religious visibility, secular space

Abstract

Background: Sacred words increasingly appear beyond explicitly religious architecture in Indonesia, where Arabic calligraphy and Islamic ornament circulate across homes, textiles, heritage sites, commercial interiors, and digital design environments. Objective: This study examines how sacred script negotiates religious visibility in secular and semi-secular Indonesian spaces through spatial placement, material translation, and social framing. Method: This study employs qualitative multimodal corpus analysis of 31 verified public, scholarly, and contextual items, coded through spatial visibility analysis, ornament-material semiotic coding, and a religious visibility negotiation matrix. Results: Sacred architectural settings remain important anchors of devotional meaning, but calligraphy also moves into domestic, textile, commercial, heritage, and hybrid cultural spaces. Its material transformation shows that sacred words become socially mobile when translated into architectural surfaces, batik motifs, framed décor, craft objects, and digital-commercial graphics. Its visibility is negotiated through devotional anchoring, heritage-cultural legitimation, aesthetic domestication, commercial commodification, intercultural mediation, and ambiguous public display. Implication: These findings indicate that religious visibility in Indonesia is produced through design-mediated accommodation rather than simple opposition between sacred and secular space. Novelty: This study contributes a multimodal account of calligraphy as negotiated visual infrastructure that connects Islamic aesthetics, linguistic landscapes, material culture, and secular-facing public space.

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