Ahmad al-Bari
1950–2013 · Damascus & Yalda
Ahmad Eid al-Bari was born in Damascus in 1950. He first met calligraphy as a schoolboy at a school beside the Umayyad Mosque, where his teacher was Shaykh Ahmad al-Attar. Serious study came later with Badawi al-Dirani in Damascus and Ibrahim al-Rifa'i in Aleppo, and Muhammad Bashir al-Idlibi gave him photographs of the old masters' work to study. In his twenties he went to Egypt and met Sayyid Ibrahim and other Cairo masters. In 1969 the Iraqi master Hashim al-Baghdadi visited him in Damascus and urged him to go to Istanbul. He did, and in 1978 Hamid Aytaç al-Amidi watched him write and gave him an ijaza, which al-Bari valued above any other honour. He became above all a copyist of the Qur'an, writing it at least eight times in thuluth, naskh and ta'liq, and he wrote inscriptions for mosques and public buildings in Damascus. He received a gold shield from the President of Iran in 2000. He was killed on 11 October 2013 when shelling struck his studio at home in Yalda, near Damascus, and he was buried there.
Achievements
- Received an ijaza in several scripts from Hamid Aytaç al-Amidi in Istanbul in 1978, with leave to license others.
- Copied the Qur'an at least eight times, among them a thuluth-and-naskh copy in the manner of Ahmed Karahisari (1980) and five naskh copies (1981–86).
- Wrote a large Qur'an in thuluth on 100 × 70 cm pages (1987).
- Wrote inscriptions for several mosques and public buildings in Damascus.
- Awarded a gold shield by the President of Iran in 2000; served on the jury of the Tehran calligraphy festival.
Taught by: Ahmad al-Attar, Muhammad Badawi al-Dirani, Ibrahim al-Rifa'i, Sayyid Ibrahim, Hamid Aytaç
His work
He died in 2013, so his calligraphy is still under copyright and is not shown; no free photograph of him was found on Wikimedia Commons.
Write in the tradition this hand shaped.
Write in this tradition now →Living calligraphers you can buy from — signed originals on paper, from AED 550: Anwar Alhulwani (Thuluth) · Ahmed Alhawary (Jali Thuluth, Naskh) · Rasha Kasim (Kufi) — or every Thuluth piece the store makes: Thuluth collection.
Sources
- dates, teachers, Cairo trip, al-Baghdadi 1969, al-Amidi ijaza 1978, Qur'an copies, awards, death 6 Dhu al-Hijja 1434 / 11 Oct 2013 in Yalda ar.wikipedia.org
- biography: Qur'an at least eight times, al-Amidi ijaza islamsyria.com
Written by the MASHQ studio · last updated 2026-10-05. Further reading, the standard references in English: Sheila S. Blair, Islamic Calligraphy (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) · Annemarie Schimmel, Calligraphy and Islamic Culture (New York University Press, 1984) · Yasin Hamid Safadi, Islamic Calligraphy (Thames and Hudson, 1978).