Naskh script

Naskh is one of the six pens canonised by Ibn Muqla, paired as the small partner of thuluth; for Maryam Ekhtiar it was ideal for ordinary books and small Qur'ans. ¹ She also lists naskh among the chancery scripts of some periods. ³

The only surviving work in Ibn al-Bawwab's hand is a small Qur'an in naskh copied at Baghdad in 1000–1001, noted for compact spacing and a dense page. ³ In the Ottoman period Shaykh Hamdullah is credited with reforms of naskh that lasted; in an album in his hand of about 1500, a large thuluth above is paired with a minute naskh (Turkish nesih) below, with vowels carefully marked for legibility. ⁴

"Revival naskh" is, for the author, a later form of naskh known for its large proportions, elegance and clarity, codified by Ahmad Nayrizi (active 1682–1739) in Iran to make naskh larger and more readable, with well-spaced lines and bold, vocalised letters. It was used mainly for Qur'ans and prayer books, part of a movement in later seventeenth-century Iran to make Arabic religious texts more accessible to Persian speakers, which is why Nayrizi's Qur'ans often carry interlinear Persian translations. The poet-calligrapher Muhammad Shafi' Visal-i Shirazi and his sons carried the style into the nineteenth century. ^{2 5}