Thuluth — the mother of scripts

Calligraphers call Thuluth umm al-khutut, the mother of scripts, because whoever masters it can master anything. Its name — 'one third' — refers to the proportion of straightness in its curves. Letters swell, dive and interlace; verticals lean with ceremonial grace; compositions stack into architecture. It is the hardest script to write well: a single Thuluth bismillah can take a master days. That is why it crowns mosque domes, frames mihrabs and carries royal inscriptions from Istanbul to Delhi. In the studio, give Thuluth room — it is a script of monuments, not margins.

The name has a second explanation. Early scripts were named after the width of their pen. The tumar, the pen kept for the decrees of the Umayyad caliphs, was cut twenty-four horse hairs wide, about 15 mm. A pen a third as wide, eight hairs or about 5 mm, gave thuluth its name. The TDV encyclopedia of Islam leans to this reading; its figures come from the Mamluk secretary al-Qalqashandi.

Who made the script is also disputed. English reference works usually credit Ibn Muqla, who died in 328 AH / 940. The TDV encyclopedia names scribes before him: Ibrahim al-Sijzi, who set a thuluth pen against the tumar, and his pupil al-Ahwal, who drew a lighter thuluth from it. What Ibn Muqla and his brother did was to put the rounded scripts under measure, letter by letter, against the alif.

A century later Ibn al-Bawwab pruned the scripts again. Then Yaqut al-Musta'simi, in Abbasid Baghdad, fixed the classical proportions of the six pens, thuluth among them. He died in 696 or 698 AH (1297 or 1299); the sources differ. Masters followed his model until Şeyh Hamdullah in Istanbul.

The unit is the dot: the small rhomb the reed leaves when it is set down and drawn its own width. In thuluth the alif stands seven dots tall. Ottoman manuals describe how it is built: a starting dot that becomes its small hook, then two dots of chest, two of body and two of tail. Hashim al-Baghdadi's model book of 1961 sets the same seven dots beside it.

The ordinary pen is 2.5 to 4 mm wide. Written with a pen three times as broad, the script becomes jali thuluth, the size of panels and buildings. The round letters, such as 'ayn, fa, qaf, mim, ha and waw, keep their eyes open. Alif, kaf and lam carry the small hook at the head.

Vowel signs are written a third as wide as the letters' own pen. Small ornamental marks fill the gaps and tie a composition together. Two Ottoman forms show how far this can go: musalsal, where every letter is joined to the next, and mirror writing, where a phrase faces its own reflection.

Because it is slow to write, thuluth was never the hand of daily business. It was kept for words that had to stand out: chapter headings in the Qur'an, book titles, album pages and inscriptions. Under the Seljuks and the Ottomans it carried most building inscriptions until the eighteenth century, when jali ta'liq began to take its place.

In Mamluk Cairo it was written in gold and colour. A Qur'an from the madrasa of Uljay al-Yusufi, probably made for Sultan Hasan in the late 1350s, opens with the basmala in thuluth so large that a page holds only a few words. Enamelled glass lamps of the period carry the sultan's name in a broad band of it.

In Mughal Agra, the great gate of the Taj Mahal is framed by Qur'anic verses in black stone set into white marble. The chief calligrapher, Amanat Khan Shirazi, wrote the higher panels slightly larger, so that from the ground the lines look even.

In Istanbul the script was reshaped more than once. Şeyh Hamdullah (1436–1520), teacher of Sultan Bayezid II, changed the forms and proportions of thuluth and naskh and the order of the line and the page. Ahmed Karahisari (about 1469–1556; some sources give 1566) went back to Yaqut instead. The TDV encyclopedia gives him the inscription of the Süleymaniye dome, rewritten under Sultan Abdülmecid by Abdülfettah Efendi, who kept its layout. His adopted son Hasan Çelebi (died 1594) wrote the mosque's inscriptions in stone and tile; English Wikipedia credits him with nearly all of its thuluth.

Hafız Osman (1642–1698) refined Hamdullah's line again. In jali, Mustafa Rakım (1757–1826) reached the proportion that later masters measured themselves against. Kazasker Mustafa İzzet (1801–1876) designed the eight great roundels of Hagia Sophia, hung during the restoration of 1847–1849. They are about 7.6 m across and carry the names of God, the Prophet, the first four caliphs, and Hasan and Husayn.

The model sheets of thuluth and naskh left by Mehmed Şevki Efendi (1829–1887) are still printed, and students still copy them.

In the Ottoman tradition a student began with thuluth. The teacher wrote the model, the mashq, in front of him, and the first lesson was a short prayer: 'Lord, make it easy and not hard; Lord, let it end in good.' The student copied the model for a week. The teacher then rewrote the faulty letters under the student's lines, and gave a new model only when the old one was learned.

First come the single letters, from alif to ya. Then each letter joined to the others: ba with alif, ba with ba, and so on. Then whole compositions. A steady student needed three or four years. For the ijazah he copied a piece by an old master, chosen by his teacher; once his teacher approved it, he could sign his own work. Since the nineteenth century printed copybooks have helped: Hutut-i Osmaniye by Mehmed İzzet and Hafız Tahsin in Istanbul, and later Hashim al-Baghdadi's book in Baghdad.

If you are starting, write the alif many times before anything else and measure it against seven dots. Keep the eyes of the round letters open. When you study a finished piece, check that the uprights have the same width and the same lean, and that the small marks serve the words without crowding them.