Kau Faham Bahasa Tak? is an explorative project that looks to reframe the neglected script of Jawi and how it can be a huge communicative tool in Malay graphic design. By upholding and referring to established Arabic calligraphic styles, Fatih explores contemporary allographs of letterform variants, showcasing the flexible possibilities and the versatility of Jawi in typography. Embracing a maximalist approach, Fatih looks towards decolonizing typography by challenging Eurocentric norms while safeguarding not only the script but also the Malay language.

I think it's awesome that you're studying and trying to preserve a script that is slowly fading from memory. To preserve something like a script, I imagine that it will take the efforts of more than one person. How do you hope the Malay community will continue to preserve this?

Maybe I’ll start off with my experience being someone who is Malay, and my experience with the Jawi script. In Singapore, the Jawi script is not used for anything at all. The only reason why I knew about the Jawi script is because I learned it in religious school. Every weekend, we go to Quranic classes, and to learn the Quran, you need to learn the Arabic letter forms. Jawi is just an extension of that Arabic letter form. So for me, I continued to learn it because I like languages and linguistics. It's not that hard to learn extra letters in the alphabet.

From my dissertation to my graduation project, I realised that first of all from my personal experience, I knew not a lot of people cared about the Jawi script because it's just an idea of supply meeting demand. One Arabic calligrapher I interviewed even said that there's no need for the Jawi script. Wherever you are in the world, the Arabic script is relevant as long as there is a Muslim community in a space but the Jawi script now is not as relevant because we already have the Latin letter forms. So it's a very hard thing to ask people to continue preserving this. My own community doesn't see the value in it. I guess, in relation to my project, I just want the Jawi script to be utilised more in graphic design, from a graphic designer's perspective.

You mentioned that even the Malay community itself doesn't see the value in preserving the Jawi script. So what do you think is special about Jawi as compared to the Romanized version Rumi?

Latin and Arabic are two different scripts that have their own pros and cons. Through my research, I realised that the reason why we adopted the Latin script was mainly because of colonisation. When colonisers came to this region, they knew that people were speaking this language and writing this script. They didn't want to learn the script, so they Latinized it. That's when even Malays said, “okay, maybe we can pick it up”.

I think it's special because it's the language of our ancestors and it's a very beautiful script, I would say. I think Latin is boring in my opinion. If you really understand the letterforms, it's not that hard to learn Jawi spelling or the script. But that was like, 50 years ago. If you ask people to start learning Jawi today, it's going to be hard. Because people don't know Jawi at all.

I feel like Arabic is very flexible and robust as well. For example, wherever the Arabic script goes, the culture that adopts the script is able to create their own version. For example, the Sini script in China looks very Chinese, but it's actually Arabic. Even in North Africa and Spain, they also have their own style that they made. Even Iran and Pakistan created their own version of the Arabic script. Turkey also created their own style and it’s distinct. So I think that the flexibility of the Arabic script is nice.