The spread of Arabic calligraphy

Calligraphy is one of the civil industries that is strengthened and weakened by the strength and weakness of civilization. The Arabs, especially the people of the Hijaz, were before Islam a Bedouin nation whose livelihood did not require the spread of writing and reading. There is nothing in their monuments in the Hijaz that indicates that they knew how to write and read except before Islam, even though they were surrounded to the north and south by civilized Arab nations who left many written inscriptions. The most famous of these nations are the Nabataeans in the north who wrote in the Nabataean script, and Himyar in The Yemenis wrote with the Musnad script, and no one was found among them to read and write until after some of them left for the Levant or Iraq, and adopted urban manners, so he borrowed writing from them, and he returned to writing Arabic in the Nabataean or Syriac script, from which the Arabic script was born.