Tarikh-i Khatt o Khattatin (History of Script and Calligraphers)

Syed Muhammad Salim's Tarikh-i Khatt o Khattatin was compiled by Syed Aziz al-Rahman and published by Zawwar Academy, Karachi, in Jumada II 1422/September 2001 in 1,000 copies. ^{2 3}

Seven parts and thirty-eight chapters. Part one covers the invention of writing, the abjad letters, Aramaic script and its offshoots (Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Pahlavi, Brahmi, Nabataean), the beginnings of Arabic script, the Meccan and Medinan scripts, the Prophet ﷺ's letters and writing materials. Part two treats "the aesthetic sense of Islam", kufic and its varieties, muhaqqaq, rayhan, thuluth, tawqi', riqa', ghubar and naskh, with Ibn Muqla, Ibn al-Bawwab, Yaqut and his pupils, the terms and books of the art and family trees of scripts and calligraphers. Part three covers ta'liq, divani, siyaqat, nasta'liq and shikasta; part four the schools of Herat, Bukhara, Iran, Turkey and Egypt and the modern revival; part five the Sultanate period in India and the Mughal school from Babur to Bahadur Shah Zafar; part six Lucknow, the princely states (Hyderabad, Rampur, Bhopal, Tonk, Alwar, Patiala), presses and madrasas; part seven Sindh, the Frontier, Kashmir, the Punjab and Bahawalpur. ^{1 4 5 6}

The book gathers lives of subcontinental calligraphers rarely found together — the court scribes of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, Hafiz Nurullah and his son at Lucknow, and the masters of Indian shikasta, Kifayat Khan and his son Darayat Khan — drawing on biographical works such as Ghulam Muhammad Haft-Qalami's Tazkira-i Khushnavisan. ^{5 7 8}