Religious Art & Worldviews · Artists
The Abbasid vizier who gave Arabic writing its proportional system — the calligrapher's geometry on which a thousand years of Qur'an copying rests.
Tagged: Calligraphy Medieval Devotional Aniconic (Calligraphic/Geometric) Proportional Script Muslim
Abu Ali Muhammad ibn Muqla, three times vizier of the Abbasid caliphs, systematized the cursive scripts: letterforms measured in rhombic dots, the alif as module, the circle as the generative figure. His system made beautiful writing teachable, checkable, and transmissible.
No page in his own hand survives. The pictured folio is from Ibn al-Bawwab's Qur'an of 1000–1001, the earliest dated manuscript written in the cursive system Ibn Muqla devised — his work surviving, as systems do, in other men's hands.
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