Persian Nastaʿlīq Calligraphy (Qiṭʿa, Chalipa and Siyāh-mashq)

• Write Persian verse in nastaʿlīq with a cut reed pen and size every letter in the dot of the pen and small circles; as Jaʿfar Tabrizi recorded around 1430, replace naskh's flat kāf and straight-bottomed sīn, lām and nūn with curved, stretched forms of varying thickness, and let each word hang down from right to left so that the letters pile up against the ruling at the end of each hemistich.
• Make a single sheet, not a page of running text: write a few couplets as a qiṭʿa, tilt the lines diagonally across the panel, and use the triangles they leave in the corners for the signature, birds or flowers; for a chalipa ('cross'), run four hemistiches of a poem diagonally, as Mir Emad did.
• Mount the panel as a treasure: write each line in a cloud-shaped reserve on a gold-illuminated ground, or let painted flowers, birds and grazing animals fill the gold between the lines, as on Mir Emad's 1608–9 folio and the Mughal illumination around Mir ʿAli's sheets; frame it in gold and coloured ink rulings, write on dyed or marbled paper, and paste it onto an album page (muraqqaʿ) within wide margins of coloured paper painted in gold, silver and colour, which later owners renewed, as the Mughal emperors did with Mir ʿAli's sheets.
• Keep the writing in black ink on a pale, tinted or marbled ground or in pale reserves within the gold, and leave the colour to the gold, the painted illumination and the dyed or painted margin; the line, not the ornament, carries the beauty.
• For a siyāh-mashq ('black practice'), fill the sheet as the practice sheets did, turning the page round to use all the space, with repeated letters, words and combinations, some real words and some fanciful, written diagonally and facing up and down the folio in heavy black ink, overlapping until the rhythm outweighs the legibility of the text; keep only a small corner for illumination, and set the finished sheet in borders like a qiṭʿa.
• Choose poetry of love and mystical longing (Saʿdi, Hafez, Amir Shahi, ʿUrfi) and let the sloping, lyrical line serve the verse: the script was made for Persian poetry, whose hemistiches it fits, and only later adopted for prose.

Iran and the Persianate courts. Virtually all Safavid authors (Dust Muhammad, Qadi Ahmad) credited Mir ʿAli Tabrizi, active at the end of the 14th and start of the 15th century, with inventing the script; Elaine Wright showed that it grew gradually out of naskh among scribes in Shiraz, and Jaʿfar Tabrizi (d. 1431), who headed Baysunghur's scriptorium in Herat, wrote around 1430 that Shirazi scribes made it from naskh by dropping the flat kāf and the straight bottoms of sīn, lām and nūn, and that Tabrizi scribes refined it until Mir ʿAli Tabrizi perfected it. Sultan ʿAli Mashhadi (d. 1520), working in Herat for Sultan Husayn Bayqara, fixed its classical form; Mir ʿAli Haravi (d. 1544/45, or c. 1550 in the Met's dating) was famed for single specimens (qiṭʿa); and Mir Emad Hassani (Qazvin c. 1552–Isfahan 1615) became the model of the following centuries. Practice sheets (siyāh-mashq) survive from about 1600 and in time were signed and collected: one in the Library of Congress is signed by Mir Emad, and a number of his siyāh-mashq sheets were illuminated for albums by Muhammad Hadi in 1747–59. The Timurids carried the script to India, where it became the favourite script of the Mughal Persian court (ʿAbd al-Rahim ʿAnbarin Qalam, Muhammad Husayn Kashmiri, and Mir Emad's nephew ʿAbd al-Rashid Daylami under Shah Jahan) and later the usual script of Urdu; in the Ottoman Empire, as talik, it had its own school whose speciality was celî nastaʿlīq for inscriptions and mosque plates. In Qajar Iran Mirza Mohammad Reza Kalhor (c. 1829–1892) brought back a compact style and adapted it to lithography, and the siyāh-mashq became a popular genre of its own in the second half of the 19th century, in the artistic revival led by Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96); the Iranian Calligraphers Association, founded in Tehran in 1950 by Mehdi Bayani, keeps nastaʿlīq a living art

1. Wikipedia, 'Nastaliq', after Sheila S. Blair, Islamic Calligraphy (Edinburgh University Press, 2006): the name 'hanging naskh', Mir ʿAli Tabrizi, Elaine Wright and Shiraz, Jaʿfar Tabrizi's account of c. 1430, proportions set by the nastaʿlīq dot and small circles, hemistiches that 'encourage the pile-up of letters against the intercolumnar ruling', Sultan ʿAli Mashhadi, Mir ʿAli Haravi's qiṭʿa, Mir Emad, Kalhor, shekasteh, the Mughal and Ottoman schools, Noori Nastaliq and the Daily Jang, and cross-platform fonts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nastaliq)
2. Freer and Sackler Galleries, press release for 'Nasta‘liq: The Genius of Persian Calligraphy' (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, opened 13 September 2014, curated by Simon Rettig): four masters, Mir Ali from Tabriz (active ca. 1370–1410), Sultan Ali from Mashhad (d. 1520), Mir Ali from Herat (d. 1545) and Mir Imad from Qazvin (d. 1615); the script 'used primarily to write poetry'; 'intentionally slanting the script for dramatic effect'; illuminated pages from Mughal albums (https://archive.asia.si.edu/press/2014/nastaliq.asp)
3. Wikipedia, 'Chalipa', after Encyclopaedia Islamica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalipa)
4. Wikipedia, 'Siyah mashq', after the Library of Congress: sheets surviving from ca. 1600, 'diagonal words and letters used in combinations facing upwards and downwards on the folio', and a genre particularly popular in the second half of the 19th century, in the artistic revival led by Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–1896) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siyah_mashq)
5. Library of Congress, African and Middle Eastern Division, 'Letter exercises', siyāh-mashq signed by Mir ʿImad al-Hasani, early 17th century, LCCN 2019714598: sheets 'entirely covered with writing', that 'in time ... became collectible items and thus were signed and dated' and were given 'decorative borders'; this one signed ''Imad' four times; a number of his siyāh-mashq sheets 'provided with illumination by Muhammad Hadi ca. 1160-1172/1747-1759' (https://lccn.loc.gov/2019714598; read from the Internet Archive copy of https://www.loc.gov/item/2019714598/)
6. Wikipedia, 'Mir Emad Hassani' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_Emad_Hassani), 'Mirza Mohammad Reza Kalhor' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirza_Mohammad_Reza_Kalhor), 'Iranian Calligraphers Association' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Calligraphers_Association) and 'Gholam Hossein Amirkhani' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gholam_Hossein_Amirkhani)
7. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mir ʿImad al-Hasani, Folio with Verses in Nastaʿliq Script, 46.126.3 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/450713)
8. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sultan ʿAli al-Mashhadi, Page of Calligraphy from an Anthology of Poetry by Saʿdi and Hafiz, 11.84.2 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/446169)
9. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Page of Calligraphy Illuminated with Animals and Plants in a Field of Flowers', Folio from the Shah Jahan Album, painting by Nanha, calligraphy by Mir ʿAli Haravi, 55.121.10.4: 'the margin, as well as the illumination surrounding the calligraphy, probably date from the seventeenth century' (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/451287); and Rashmi Viswanathan, 'The Shah Jahan Album', Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (2010): 'sheep and deer graze among the lines of nasta‘liq script' (https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-shah-jahan-album)
10. Metropolitan Museum of Art, ʿAbd al-Rahim, Page of Calligraphy, 1994.359 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/453355)
11. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Muhammad Husayn al-Katib, Page of Calligraphy, 1993.380 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/453348)
12. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sayyid Amir ʿAli, Panel of Nastaʿliq Calligraphy, 1999.356 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/453983)
13. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Album Page with Calligraphy Exercise (siyah mashq) by Muhammad Shah Qajar, 2016.535 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/716305)
14. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mashq or Practice Page, 62.152.12: calligraphers 'would turn the page around several times and fill all the available space', and in the 19th century some 'began to emulate these dark, heavily worked sheets as works of art in their own right' (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/451687); and Asadullah Shirazi, Album Leaf with Calligraphic Exercise (siyah mashq): mashq pages 'emerged as a popular art form after the sixteenth century in a fascinating manifestation of calligraphic abstraction' (2016.536, Asadullah Shirazi, 1842–3; https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/716307)
15. Victoria and Albert Museum, illuminated panel of calligraphy signed Mir Ali on indigo-dyed paper, IM.26A-1925 (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1160770), and Leaf from an album of specimens of Persian calligraphy framed with gold and ink ruling and marbled paper, MSL/1876/676/1 (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O245418)
16. Fonts: Noto Nastaliq Urdu, 'especially in the Urdu language', OFL-1.1 (https://fontsource.org/fonts/noto-nastaliq-urdu/about); SIL, Awami Nastaliq, 'extended to support languages of Pakistan', SIL Open Font License (https://software.sil.org/awami/); IranNastaliq, Ubuntu package fonts-irannastaliq, 'IranNastaliq font for Persian/Arabic script' (https://aptpeek.dev/ubuntu/stonking/universe/armhf/fonts-irannastaliq/1.5-0ubuntu1), and a web repackaging 'created by scict.ir' and listed as OFL-1.1 (https://github.com/font-store/font-IranNastaliq)
17. Rustin Zarkar and Shahrzad Ghadjar, 'Taking Back the Streets: Iranian Graffiti Artists Negotiating Public Space', Ajam Media Collective (5 November 2012), on A1one's haqiqat and siah-mashq (https://ajammc.com/2012/11/05/taking-back-the-streets-iranian-graffiti-artists-negotiating-public-space/)

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