Prominent Quran Calligrapher Uthman Taha Receives Saudi Citizenship
The Sabaq daily reported on Sunday that that a royal order was issued to grant Saudi citizenship to the prominent figure, Sputnik Arabic reported.
Born in 1934 in Aleppo, Syria, Taha learned calligraphy with great Syrian and Turkish masters.
His father was also a skilled calligrapher, who used the Ruq’ah script, and Taha studied with several of Syria’s finest calligraphers.
When he moved to Damascus for university, Taha began to learn other scripts, including Thuluth, Naskh (in which he is now considered a master), and Persian. He received his calligraphy certificate from master calligrapher Hamed Al-Amadi in 1973.
He calligraphed his first Quran copy in 1970 for Syria’s Awqaf Ministry.
Taha has lived in Saudi Arabia since 1988. He is the official calligrapher of the Quran at the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran in Medina.
Taha is regarded as one of the most skilled calligraphers in the Arab world. His wife says he continues to practice calligraphy daily.
Taha has written the Quran 12 times at the King Fahd Complex.
He writes the Quran in the Ottoman script, and copies of his work have been distributed throughout the Islamic world.
What makes Taha’s work unique is that each page of the Quran that he writes concludes at the end of a verse. The secret, he explains, is to simplify the words — which is the origin of the Kufic script in which the Quran has been written since the days of Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) companions — keeping the letters close to one another.
Taha spent years perfecting his technique of evenly distributing the words in every line so that the space between the lettering is consistent throughout every page of every book, which means eliminating many of the script combinations that make such consistency difficult.
