Nasta'liq script

For Maryam Ekhtiar, nasta'liq is an elegant, lyrical script that originated in Iran and Central Asia and spread east to Mughal India and west to Ottoman Turkey. As the favoured script of Persian poetry — called the "bride of scripts" — it was especially popular in Iran from the fifteenth century. ¹

The author reports a legend that Mir Ali Tabrizi (active late fourteenth century) invented it after Ali ibn Abi Talib — traditionally regarded as the first calligrapher in Islam — appeared to him in a dream and told him to make letters like the wings of flying geese. Scholars, however, hold that nasta'liq developed in the second half of the fourteenth century in Shiraz and Tabriz as a gradual merging of naskh and ta'liq, joining the evenness and legibility of naskh to the sweeping strokes of ta'liq. ¹

Mir Ali's fame was matched in the next generation by his pupil Ja'far al-Tabrizi, head of Prince Baysunghur's scriptorium at Herat from 1419 to 1433. One of Ja'far's pupils trained Sultan Ali Mashhadi (about 1440–1520), author of an influential treatise on penmanship and its spiritual side; Sultan Ali's pupils included Sultan Muhammad Nur, known for a minute hand (khafi), and Mir Ali Haravi (1476–1544), much prized at the Mughal court. ¹ Later Mir Imad al-Hasani (1552–1615) was chief calligrapher at the court of Shah Abbas I in Isfahan; he was killed in 1615, possibly, the author says, at the shah's command, and his style remained a model in Iran into the nineteenth century, through Mirza Ghulam Riza Isfahani, and in Mughal India and Ottoman Turkey. ²

The Met holds two folios from the Shah Jahan Album, begun by Jahangir and continued by Shah Jahan: one by Sultan Ali Mashhadi with love verses rich in Sufi metaphor in diagonal lines, the other a quatrain by Ibn Yamin signed by Mir Ali Haravi, both reset in seventeenth-century illuminated margins, the second with birds and animals painted by Nanha. ^{3 4 5}