Islamic Calligraphy: Exploring the Art

Almost every piece of Islamic wall art is written in one of about a dozen named scripts, and the script is the single biggest thing separating one piece from another. Two panels can carry the same verse and look nothing alike. This is a guide to telling them apart.

Where the scripts come from

The earliest Arabic hands were angular. Ma'qili was built entirely from straight lines and right angles — closer to a grid than to handwriting. From it came Kufic, named for the Iraqi city of Kufa, founded under the caliph Umar and later the capital of Ali. For roughly the first three centuries of Islam, Kufic was the script of the Qur'an, which is why it is sometimes called umm al-khutut, the mother of scripts. We cover it in more depth in our guide to Kufic calligraphy.

The turning point came in the tenth century. Ibn Muqla (886–940), three times vizier to the Abbasid caliphs, put Arabic letterforms on a geometric footing: a system of proportion — al-khatt al-mansub — in which every letter was measured against the alif, the rhombic dot and the circle. Beauty became something that could be checked against a standard rather than judged by eye. He died in prison in 940. Ibn al-Bawwab and later Yaqut al-Musta'simi refined the system over the following three centuries.

The six canonical scripts

What Ibn Muqla's system produced is known as al-aqlam al-sitta — the six pens, or aklam-ı sitte in Turkish. These six are the classical canon:

Script	Turkish name	Character	Traditionally used for
Thuluth	Sülüs	Large, sweeping, strongly curved. The most decorative of the six.	Mosque inscriptions, titles, monumental panels
Naskh	Nesih	Small, even, highly legible. The everyday book hand.	Qur'an manuscripts and printed Arabic to this day
Muhaqqaq	Muhakkak	Like Thuluth but with longer, flatter horizontal strokes.	Large Qur'ans, mainly before the 16th century
Rayhani	Reyhani	A finer Muhaqqaq, named for the basil plant.	Smaller Qur'ans and fine manuscripts
Tawqi'	Tevki	Rounded, dynamic, with letters joined that normally stand apart.	Chancery documents and imperial signatures
Riqa'	Rika	A small Tawqi'. Rounded and compact.	Letters, colophons, and later the ijaza certificate hand

Two scripts that are constantly confused

Riqa' (رقاع) and Ruq'ah (رقعة) are not the same script, and almost every English-language guide runs them together.

Riqa' is one of the six canonical scripts, a tenth-century hand refined by Şeyh Hamdullah in the fifteenth century. It is essentially obsolete today except in the ijaza tradition.
Ruq'ah is far younger — a simplification of Divani built from short strokes, developed in the late Ottoman period for the bureaucracy. It is the everyday handwriting of the modern Arab world and the script most Arabic speakers actually write in.

If a wall piece is described as being in "Rika" it is almost always Ruq'ah that is meant, or the description has been copied from a source that made the same slip.

The later scripts

Ta'liq (Talik) — every letter rounded, the exact opposite of Ma'qili. Persian in origin; its descendant Nasta'liq is the dominant script of Persian and Urdu.
Divani — densely interlocked and dynamic, developed for Ottoman imperial edicts. Deliberately hard to forge, and hard to read at speed.
Celi — not a script but a scale. Celi means "clear" or "large": Celi Sülüs is Thuluth written big, for mosque plaques and inscriptions. Most large calligraphic wall art descends from this tradition.
Gubari — from ghubar, "dust". An extremely fine hand used for miniature Qur'ans and pigeon-post messages.
Siyakat — the Ottoman treasury and land-registry hand, designed to be difficult for outsiders to read. A security measure, not an aesthetic one.

Recognising a script on a wall piece

Three questions get you most of the way:

Are the letters angular or curved? Straight lines and right angles mean Kufic, or a modern geometric design derived from it. Curves mean one of the cursive hands.
Do the vertical strokes lean or stand? Upright verticals with deep sweeping bowls below the line are Thuluth. Even, compact letters that sit on a level baseline are Naskh.
Does the text hang downward to the left? That diagonal descent is the signature of Ta'liq and Nasta'liq.

Everything else is refinement of those three.

Which script suits which piece

Kufic survives scaling and simplification better than any other script, because it was built on a grid to begin with. It is the natural choice for laser-cut metal and for square or circular compositions — see the Kufic collection.
Thuluth is what most people picture when they picture Arabic calligraphy: long horizontal panels where the sweep of the script carries the composition. Our Thuluth Bismillah is a straightforward example.
Naskh is the right script when the text is long and meant to be read rather than admired — full verses, Ayatul Kursi at length, panels with translation.
Geometric and modern hands that do not belong to any historical canon are common in contemporary design, and there is nothing wrong with them; they simply are not classical scripts, and a seller who calls one "Thuluth" is guessing.

Browse the full Islamic wall art collection across metal, wood, glass and canvas, with the script named on each product page.

Sources for the historical material: the Khalili Research Centre's notes on the six scripts at the Ashmolean Museum, and Calligraphy Qalam's script references. This article describes the history and visual character of the scripts only.