Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Tayyibi (calligrapher)

Muhammad ibn Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Umar al-Tayyibi al-Shafi'i compiled on Wednesday 12 Rajab 908/11 January 1503 a very large (47 × 30 cm) but slim volume that is, according to its colophon, the first album of calligraphic specimens to survive from the Arab world. The ex-libris on its opening page shows that he made it for the library of the last Mamluk sultan, Qansawh al-Ghawri (r. 1501–16). ¹

Its 94-page text recounts the method of writing descended from Ibn al-Bawwab down to the author, who credits himself with inventing two scripts. It opens with twelve pages showing how to make the individual letters by Ibn al-Bawwab's method, formed of dots and measured proportionally; pages 16–32 cover the history of writing and the ways of nibbing the pen; sixty-two pages of script samples follow. Illustration outweighs commentary: the finely penned samples fill two-thirds of the volume and show nineteen scripts, though the preface lists only seventeen. For Blair it is not a how-to manual but a visual encomium meant to display the calligrapher's prowess and win the favour of a sultan who was himself interested in adab and a generous patron. ¹

Blair calls it the first surviving source to give both names and examples of individual scripts, so that for more than nine hundred years before it no sample of a named script survives. Adam Gacek derived five sizes of script, measured by the height of alif, from its illustrations. Al-Tayyibi uses scripts such as musalsal to make a word stand out, as we use bold type, illustrates muqtarin, a variety of riqa' in paired lines, and shows manthur as a variety of naskh. ^{2 3 4 5}