Mir Ali Tabrizi
Mir Ali Tabrizi was a calligrapher active in Tabriz in the late 14th century and perhaps the early 15th. Later masters credited him with turning nastaliq into a script with its own rules, and Sultan Ali Mashhadi's verse treatise on calligraphy names him as its inventor. Very little about his life is certain. Encyclopaedia Iranica, following Mahdi Bayani, identifies him as Ali ibn Hasan Tabrizi, a sayyid and a contemporary of Timur, and notes that another scribe of the same name, Ali ibn Ilyas, worked in the same years. The only manuscript Iranica accepts as his is a copy of Nizami's Khusraw and Shirin, signed Ali ibn Hasan al-Sultani in Tabriz and now in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington. Iranica names Jafar Tabrizi as his pupil, through whom his proportions passed to the scribes of Timurid Herat.
Achievements
- Later calligraphers credited him with inventing nastaliq or giving it its first fixed rules.
- Sultan Ali Mashhadi's verse treatise on calligraphy names him as the inventor of nastaliq.
- Titled Qudwat al-Kuttab, usually rendered "model of the scribes".
- The one manuscript Iranica accepts as his hand is Nizami's Khusraw and Shirin, signed Ali ibn Hasan al-Sultani in Tabriz (Freer Gallery of Art).
- His proportions were carried on in Herat by Jafar Tabrizi and Azhar, and later by Mir Ali Heravi.
Taught: Jafar Tabrizi (Ja'far Baysunghuri)
His work
about 1400 · Freer Gallery of Art, Washington
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain
about 1400 · Freer Gallery of Art, Washington
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain
798 AH (1396), Baghdad · British Library, London (Add MS 18113, f. 85r)
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain
These are the works in open collections that can be attributed with certainty.
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 Nastaliq piece the store makes: Nastaliq collection.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Iranica, P. P. Soucek, "ʿALĪ TABRĪZĪ (calligrapher)" (archived copy; live site blocks scripts) web.archive.org
- en.wikipedia: Qudwat al-Kuttab title, naskh + taliq origin story, Jafar-pupil "myth" remark en.wikipedia.org
- fa.wikipedia: c. 780-850 AH, Britannica dates, two Mir Alis, Khwaju Kermani manuscript fa.wikipedia.org
- ar.wikipedia: Arabic name form, death 850 AH ar.wikipedia.org
- Wikidata wikidata.org
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).