Farsi / Nastaliq — the bride of scriptsالفارسي / النستعليق — عروس الخطوط

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. Mir Ali Tabrizi codified it in the fourteenth century, and 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.