Between 1979 and 1983 AlYousif set narrative subjects aside for a shorter, more concentrated engagement with Arabic calligraphy. The script here is handled as form and pattern as much as text, letters massed and balanced across the page in compositions that owe as much to his eye for structure as to any devotional tradition.

The best known of these, Arabic Calligraphy - Al Fatiha, takes the Quran's opening chapter as its ground, the letters arranged with the same rhythmic discipline he brought to his figure paintings. Though this remained a comparatively brief chapter in a long career, it sharpened a sense of line and arrangement that carries forward into the etchings of the following decade, and it stands as a deliberate, if temporary, turn from the human figure toward the abstract authority of the written word.