Persian Calligraphy

When Persian, written in Arabic script since the 10th century, finally received its own calligraphic form it was through Mir Ali Tabrizi (d. c. 1420). He combined the upright body of Naskh with the hanging line of Taʿlīq to produce a script whose horizontal sweep mirrors the metric flow of Persian verse. Two centuries later Mir Emad Hassani (1554–1615) brought it to its classical perfection; his couplet exemplars are still copied in every Iranian school.

"The pen is a cypress in the garden of knowledge; let it cast its shadow on white paper."

Kufic dominates the brickwork of Seljuk and Ilkhanid Iran. In its banna'i (squared) form it disappears entirely into geometric grids spelling the names of Allah, Muhammad and Ali across whole façades. The twelfth-century mihrab of Oljaytu in the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan is among the finest stucco Kufic surviving anywhere.

In the 1960s a group of Tehran painters — Hossein Zenderoudi, Faramarz Pilaram, Parviz Tanavoli — broke the script free of the page and turned it into pure painting. The Saqqakhaneh school used the visual vocabulary of Shiʿi votive inscriptions to invent a uniquely Iranian modernism. Their work now sets auction records — Zenderoudi's The Hand sold for $1.6 m at Christie's in 2008 — and their students dominate contemporary Iranian art.

Where Nastaʿlīq is the ceremonial hand of poetry, Shekasteh Nastaʿlīq ("broken Nastaʿlīq") is the cursive that grew out of it for everyday use — letters, court decrees, marginal notes. Invented around 1670 by Mortaza Qoli Khan Shamlu and perfected by Darvish Abdolmajid Taleqani in the 18th century, Shekasteh dissolves the discrete letters of Nastaʿlīq into a continuous, almost musical ligature. A single line can run unbroken from the right margin to the left, with the pen never leaving the paper.

Shekasteh is notoriously hard to read — even Persian speakers need training — and it was for that reason the preferred script of Qajar diplomats writing in confidence. The 19th-century master Mishkin-Qalam took Shekasteh into pictorial calligraphy, writing whole couplets in the shape of birds, lions and human faces; his work is preserved at the V&A and the Bahá'í World Centre in Haifa.

A siyāh-mashq (literally "black practice") is what happens when a Nastaʿlīq calligrapher fills a page with repeated letter combinations, overlapping at every angle, until the surface is a dense black weave with only ghostly white intervals. Originally a thrift — paper was expensive, the same sheet was practiced on until saturated — the siyāh-mashq became a recognised art form in its own right by the 19th century. Master sheets by Mirza Gholamreza Esfahani now hang as paintings at the Met and the Doha Museum of Islamic Art.

"The student writes to learn. The master writes to remember. Both writings, in time, become the same line."

A Nastaʿlīq line is determined absolutely by the cut of the pen. The reed (qalam) is hollow, harvested from the Persian Gulf or the marshes of Khuzestan, aged for two years in horse manure to harden the fibers, and then sharpened with a curved bone-handled knife (qalamtarāsh). The crucial cut is the oblique slope at the writing end: 30° for Naskh, 45° for Nastaʿlīq, 60° for Shekasteh. A misjudgment of two degrees and the script's characteristic thick-to-thin transition collapses.

The slit running back from the nib — narrow, perfectly central — meters the ink by capillary action. Master calligraphers maintain a private vocabulary for the sound a well-cut qalam makes on burnished paper: a faint khish-khish like silk on silk, audible across a quiet room and proof that the pen is moving at the correct angle. When the sound changes, the line is wrong.

Live Wikimedia Commons gallery of historical Persian calligraphy from major museum collections — Nastaʿlīq, Shekasteh, Kufic and Thuluth.

Images shown here are served from the local media library.