Farsi / Nastaliq — the bride of scripts

By the usual account, Persian masters crossed Naskh with the older Ta'liq and produced Nastaliq — 'the bride of scripts'. It hangs from the line rather than sitting on it: words begin high and pour down to the left in long diagonal cascades, thin where the pen rises and suddenly full where it turns. Its first forms appear in fourteenth-century Iran; tradition credits Mir Ali Tabrizi, who worked in the early fifteenth century, with giving it its rules. It became the voice of Persian, Urdu and Ottoman poetry — Hafez and Rumi simply look wrong in anything else. Use it when the text is lyric: a verse, a name meant to be whispered, a line meant to fall like silk.

The name is a contraction of naskh-i ta'liq. Iranians call the script nasta'liq, Arabs al-khatt al-farisi, 'the Persian hand', and Ottoman Turks simply ta'liq. Its forerunners appear in the fourteenth century, when books copied in naskh in western Iran begin to lean towards hanging forms.

Dated examples follow one another: the poems of Imad Faqih copied in Shiraz in 772 AH / 1370, a Persian Kalila and Dimna copied in Tabriz in 1370–71, and in Baghdad, in 798 AH / 1396, the poems of Khwaju Kirmani now in the British Library, already in a mature hand. Their scribe signed as Mir Ali ibn Ilyas al-Bavarchi al-Tabrizi. Many scholars take him for the Mir Ali Tabrizi of the later story; the TDV encyclopedia treats them as two men.

Later tradition gives the invention to Mir Ali Tabrizi. The eighteenth-century Ottoman biographer Müstakimzade records a story that he saw Ali ibn Abi Talib in a dream, was told to study the shape of a goose, and devised the script around 823 AH / 1420. The TDV encyclopedia of Islam notes that mature examples are older than that, and concludes that he gave the script its rules rather than invented it. The oldest written account, by Ja'far Tabrizi about 1430 and found by Elaine Wright, derives nasta'liq from naskh: reshaped in Shiraz, refined in Tabriz, perfected by Mir Ali. Francis Richard argues from Tabriz manuscripts that Shiraz was not alone.

In Timurid Herat the script found its eastern, Khurasani manner. Ja'far Tabrizi ran the library and workshop of Prince Baysunghur, and his pupil Azhar carried the line on. Sultan Ali Mashhadi (died 1520) worked for Sultan Husayn Bayqara and his minister Ali-Shir Nava'i. In 1514, back in Mashhad, he set down in Persian verse his advice on the pen and its teaching, called Sirat al-sutur in Ottoman sources and Adab-i khatt in others. The copy of Sultan Husayn's own poems dated 905 AH / 1500, now in New York, is in his hand.

Mir Ali Haravi followed, signing as 'the sultan's scribe'. Carried off to Bukhara in 1528, he taught there until his death in 1544, and he too left a treatise, Midad al-khutut. Then Mir Emad Hasani (1554–1615), born in Qazvin and working for Shah Abbas in Isfahan, joined the manners of Mir Ali and Baba Shah Isfahani. The TDV encyclopedia judges that no one in Iran has reached his rank since.

Album pieces are written with a reed cut 2 to 3 mm wide. A finer pen gives the small book hand, and a pen three times as broad gives the jali of inscriptions. The alif is short: three dots in Hashim al-Baghdadi's model book. What is long is the stretched letter, the kashida.

A nineteenth-century work by Reza-Qoli Adib of Shiraz, the Risala-yi Mir Ali Tabrizi, follows the measures of Mir Ali's own pieces and stretches the kashida to twelve or twelve and a half dots. Persian masters wrote it eight to eleven dots long; the Ottoman Yesarizade fixed it at ten to eleven. Bowl-shaped letters are about two and a half dots wide inside in the Persian school, three in the Turkish. The TDV encyclopedia puts the difference simply: Persian letters are seen in profile, Turkish ones face you.

Nasta'liq became the hand of Persian poetry and fine prose: the divans of Hafez, the Masnavi of Rumi, the Gulistan of Sa'di. From Iran it went to Mughal India, where it served Persian and later Urdu, and it is still widely used for Urdu in India and Pakistan.

In the nineteenth century Mirza Mohammad Reza Kalhor (about 1829–1892) brought back a compact nasta'liq, each small word written in one movement, well suited to the lithographed books of Qajar Iran. Beside it grew shikasta, 'broken' nasta'liq, written fast in Safavid offices from the middle of the seventeenth century. Letters that never join elsewhere join here, and words run into one another. Abd al-Majid Taleqani took it to its height in the eighteenth century.

Persian calligraphers brought nasta'liq to Istanbul under Mehmed II. Mir Emad's manner was spread there by Dervish Abdi, a Turk from Bukhara. In the eighteenth century Yesari Mehmed Es'ad began to give the Ottoman ta'liq a character of its own, and from about 1215 AH / 1800 his son Yesarizade Mustafa İzzet fixed its measures and founded the Turkish school. A licence in nasta'liq in his hand is kept in Istanbul University Library.

The Ottomans took jali ta'liq furthest. From the eighteenth century it replaced jali thuluth on many building inscriptions, and the TDV encyclopedia holds that no other land brought its jali to the same level. Sami Efendi (died 1912) was its leading late master.

Ottoman teachers closed the single letters of nasta'liq with a Persian couplet: now that the single letters are done, the time of the joined ones has come. The student then wrote verses, often from Jami, until the teacher granted the ijazah.

Persian masters left another kind of page: the siyah mashq, the 'black exercise', where letters and words are written over and across each other until the sheet is dark. The exercise sheets of Mirza Gholam-Reza Esfahani (about 1830–1887) are now kept and shown as works in their own right; Maryam Ekhtiar has written their history.

If you are starting, write the kashida and the bowls of nun and ya until their curves sit at the same depth. Keep the alif short. Then write one half-line of verse at a time, and check that every word starts from the same height.