Sultan Ali Mashhadi

According to Sheila Blair, nasta'liq reached its classical form under Sultan Ali Mashhadi, a student of Azhar or of one of Azhar's students. Orphaned young, he spent most of his long career (c. 1453–1520) in Herat working for the great bibliophiles of the Timurid court, the ruler Sultan Husayn Bayqara and his boon companion Ali Shir Nava'i. ¹

In 1514, after retiring to Mashhad, he wrote a verse treatise on calligraphy that Qadi Ahmad incorporated in his history of calligraphers and painters; it contains both practical and autobiographical information and shows the close association between religious discipline and the practice of calligraphy. ¹

Among his finest manuscripts is a copy of Farid al-Din Attar's Mantiq al-Tayr completed on 1 Jumada I 892/25 April 1487, which Blair judges the finest of the luxury copies made at that time. Each page has twenty-two lines in four columns; alif, without a hook, is pitched slightly to the right; his hand is more spacious and delicate than that of his predecessor Ja'far Baysunghuri, lengthening strokes such as that of kaf to guide the eye and raising rhyme endings above the line. He left space for eight nearly full-page paintings and stretched the preceding text into diagonal boxes so that each painting is framed by the verses it illustrates. Blair describes his script as a fine balance between fluidity and discipline — the qualities named in his own treatise. ^{2 3}

Blair notes that the nasta'liq of Timurid masters such as Sultan Ali remained the model, and that the more fluid eastern style he canonised displaced other styles. ^{4 5}