Ibn Muqlah

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Abu 'ali Muhammad Ibn 'ali Ibn Muqlah Shirazi (Persian: ابن مقله شیرازی) of Iranian Origin (born 886 in Baghdad--died 20 July 940 there) was an Islamic calligrapher, one of the foremost of the Abbasid age. It is thought that he invented the thuluth script, the first cursive style of Arabic, though none of his original work remains.

Ibn Muqlah was also a government official. By age 22 he was a scribe as well as two other important jobs. He was the visier three times under the Abbasaid caliph in Baghdad. After years of fighting for causes he believed in, he was public disgraced and imprisoned in 936. After four years of maltreatment, he died.

It is said that writing poured from his hands, and to his followers he was considered a prophet and a hero. Along with Ibn al-Bawwab and Yaqut al-Musta'simi, he is considered the founder of the modern syle.

While Ibn Muqlah often was credited with the invention of the cursive scripts like Nasta'liq and other sitta styles, it can be said with fair certainty that he invented no script styles at all. Instead, he applied to the whole available art of calligraphy specific reformist canons which amounted to a new method for transcribing already familiar scripts. He provided the means for replacing more individual calligraphic inclinations with styles based on ordered, objective, and universally applicable rules. Thus, his khatt al-mansub (proportioned script) offered for the first time in Islamic calligraphy a fixed unit of measurement -- the rhomboid point of ink lift by the pressure of the reed pen in one spot. The upright vertical stroke of the alif was to be measured in its terms -- some scripts made alifs of three points in height, other, five or even seven. Curving letters,c like the nun which formed a half circle, had diameters the size of their script's alif; and every letter stood in fixed relation to the alif or the rhomboid point. Script was now regulated on geometric principles, and the passion for mathematics and musical harmony that characterized so much of medieval Islamic culture found another outlet in this central Muslim art.

Unfortunately, no authentic work in Ibn Muqlah's hand is known to exist, but his principles are clear. They rapidly became influential but apparently were viewed as too strictly governed by mathematical certainties for two generations later Ibn al-Bawwab was credited with bringing artistry to Ibn Muqlah's rules